Fictional Cities::London films

		Blowup One weekend in the life of David Hemmings, a photographer in Swinging 60s London. He emerges from a doss-house, where he's been photographing poverty and suffering, hops into his Rolls Royce and returns to his studio to photograph skinny 'birds' with too much make-up and lots of 60s hair. Later he visits a park and photographs a secretive couple, one half of which (Vanessa Redgrave) freaks out and follows him to his studio. He finds foul play in blowups of the photos he took and...stuff happens. It's a weird mix of big-studio values and odd 'European' artiness, with slow passages, non-natural dialogue, and a strange jeep full of mime artists which appears at the beginning and the end of the film. Much of the filming is in South East London around Woolwich - the park definitely and the doss house and studio too maybe, but it has a West London mewsiness to it. The park is Maryon Park in Charlton. The mime artists appear at first in a modern bit of development behind Piccadilly, which must have just been built when the film was made. Later Hemmings drives down London Wall past waste ground which is now the Museum of London (below). The 'drug-party' house is in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. Oddest of all is the strange neon sign which looms over the park (left below), and which must've been specially erected. And was there a street with all the shops painted red and owned by the same company(above left)? All in all an enjoyably puzzling film, of its time but not jarringly dated. Illusion, perception, reality...whatever.
Closer Famous, at least in these parts, for the Postman's Park plot device at the end, this has lots of London in it, but lacks that certain something in most other areas. The vista in the screen capture is NOT from the restaurant in the bookshop now occupying the old Simpsons shop in Piccadilly, as I initially (and lazily) thought and wrote, but seems to be from a mystery location behind the National Gallery. Death Line a.k.a Raw Meat A classic horror film of the 70s, and a classic London Underground film. Cannibals haunt the Piccadilly Line and when a peer disappears at Russell Square (a station which acquired an even more gruesome reputation after recent bombings) the police have to act. Which gives Donald Pleasence a chance to grouch it up hugely as a cockney version of Inspector Morse. His performance makes the film, as do the gruesome slow tracking shots through the cannibal's lair and some fine creepy tunnels. These tunnels are rumoured to have been shot at some disused railway properties in Shoreditch. (More info on this would be welcome.) But there's not much more location fascination, to be honest. The last cannibal, who loses his pregnant wife at the beginning of the film, is, for a murdering, drooling and shambling would-be rapist, a sad character in the Frankenstein mould, whose only English is 'mind the doors'. Death Line also uses the long-closed (British) Museum Station in the plot and verily has many moments. It was remade as Creep in 2004.
		The Fallen Idol From the same writer/director team that gave us The Third Man - Graham Greene and Carol Reed - comes a less wonderful, but still great, film set in post-war London. It's the story of Phillipe, a French ambassador's son, who idolises the embassy's butler but thereby becomes involved in murder and is forced into a series of progressively more serious lies. The butler, Baines, is played by a somewhat youthful Ralph Richardson and Phillipe by Bobby Henrey, who only made one other film and now lives in Connecticut. The black and white photography is striking, and there are some impressively plush Belgravia locations, featuring wide roads, narrow alleys and some fine old cars and an over-used horse and cart. The embassy itself is now the HQ of St John's Ambulance in Belgrave Square, and the mews with the pub and tea rooms that Baines frequents is Belgrave Mews; but nasty modern buildings have robbed the latter of atmosphere. Also worth a mention are a trip to Regent's Park zoo and Phillipe's night-time dash in his 'jamas through spooky damp back alleys. Finisterre Made in 2003 in somewhat self-conscious thrall to The London Nobody Knows (see below) for the band Saint Etienne, this is more than a mere album promo, but less than the work of art it's claimed to be. There's a portentous voice-over and chat from the band's mates between the music, but the visuals, although pretty, are a bit too static for me. There's some nice scenes filmed from Primrose Hill and of London in torrential rain, but the coverage of graffiti and the scowling council estate kids, for example, is a bit predictable and obviously 'now'. Maybe the film needs a few decades of hindsight to find its place. The commentary on the DVD, by film-makers Kieran Evans & Paul Kelly and St Etienne's Bob Stanley, actually adds interest, by telling you who's talking and stuff about the places filmed.
Hue and cry An Early Ealing comedy set in the post-WWII London of riverside ruins and bombsites, this features Norman Fowler as one of a gang of urchins who live amongst these ruins. He went on to become a TV rent-a-cockney supporting face in later decades but here, as a somewhat unyoung child star, he stars credibly. The story involves his gang uncovering criminal activities which are communicated to the crooks themselves through a children's comic. The comic is called The Trump and is based on more text-based early comics, like The Rover and the stories are Sexton Blake-like. As the kids match the fictional stories to real-life crimes they meet up with the author (an eccentric performance, even for him, from Alistair Sim) and then try to convince the police with, of course, little success and have to track down the villains themselves. It's all good gripping fun played out against a crumbling back-drop of bombed-out houses and dockside dilapidation. All very evocative if you like that sort of thing, and I do. The final showdown is especially full of fine scenery, with some geographical liberties played too, like transposing the steps by the ICA to the City riverside. Lots of mysterious and yet familiar locations to identify - more stills here.
		London Belongs to Me Set in a house in a Victorian terrace in Kennington, this tells some intersecting odd stories of the house's inhabitants, which include Alistair Sim as a seedy 'medium' and Richard Attenborough as a lad tempted by criminality which leads to murder. It's a quirky tapestry-of-life job, like an Ealing comedy with less laughs. It's set just before WWII and feeling strangely like the prequel to Sarah Waters' novel Night watch. It feels like real London too, although I'm not sure there were indoor funfairs in Streatham, but maybe. The opening credit sequence features a swoop over the river from Southwark to Westminster frustratingly obscured by the titles. This was made in 1948 by Launder and Gilliat, from a novel by Norman Collins which was filmed again as a Thames TV series in the 1970s.
		The London Nobody Knows A short film based on the book of the same name by Geoffrey Fletcher, this sees James Mason picking his way around London's less groovy and more endangered locales in 1967. Derelict theatres, Victorian lavatories, a gas-lighter in the Temple, pie & mash shops (below) and squalid Spitalfields with its local meths drinkers are all included and bid farewell to, mostly. But the tone is unsentimental, and the fact that some of the film's subjects might not be missed is readily admitted. There's some fine views of the still-busy Thames (left) as well as mini-skirts in Chelsea and street markets in Islington and Marylebone. The reputation of this film has grown in recent years and it has become the Citizen Kane of the psychogeographically inclined, and inspired the likes of Finisterre and Patrick Keiller's London. Having lately only been watchable as excerpts on YouTube The London Nobody Knows was recently (February 2008) released on DVD in the UK coupled with a complete waste of time called Les Bicyclettes de Belsize. They are depressingly billed as 'two gems of swinging-sixties cinema'.
Match Point When this film came out there was much talk in the reviews of how Woody Allen couldn't write authentic dialogue into the mouths of real Brits, and how he'd resorted to tourist-cliché London locations. Well, convincing as these observations sound, when you come to see the film they turn out to be tosh. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the lead actor, sounds pretty wooden at times, for some reason, but overall the (mostly British) actors sound fine. OK maybe the two cops at the end are a bit stilted too, but that's about it. The locations seem pretty appropriate too - everyone is going to the bloody Tate Modern these days, and where better for a courting-couple stroll than Green Park? And the film itself in its themes and pace and style is refreshingly un-Woodyish.