In summary, it’s a Carnaby Street heist caper: to make fools of the Establishment, two posh brothers steal the Crown Jewels. One rediscovery from 1967, the year of Sgt Pepper, is The Jokers, by a director who has since become a national figure of fun – Michael Winner. But it also evokes a different sort of nostalgia – because, as Fulton notes, this was a radical era, in terms of change if not of clarity a nostalgia for the baroquely tangled and splendid highs and lows of things we once furiously debated, and for the futures that once seemed to lie ahead.
To those of a certain age, watching a selection of these films back to back opens a floodgate of memory and unexpected affection: for the uncluttered, unreconstructed drabness of city streets and the faces and objects found in them. What these films share, he says, is “the idea of the British national identity being challenged by diversity”. In putting together his season ‘After the Wave: Lost and Forgotten British Cinema 1967-1979’, Fulton identifies a common sensibility in works as diverse as the Peter Cook vehicle The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, Stephen Frears’ private-eye homage Gumshoe and Horace Ové’s 1975 snapshot of black Notting Hill, Pressure. Between the New Wave and the arrival of what Fulton identifies (taking 1979’s The Long Good Friday as his marker) as the “Thatcher era” of British cinema, fascinating British films were made that have subsequently been buried beneath memories of the era’s more prominent ongoing franchises, such as Carry On and James Bond – and as a result, they’re almost impossible to see. In its place a new scene briefly flourished that was as diverse as it was hard to summarise, producing British films that, as programmer Niall Fulton puts it, “asked bold questions in a bold way”.
By collaging Billy’s fantasies, impossible and otherwise, into the sour, self-suffocating, realist shtick so typical of Tony Richardson’s Woodfall films, John Schlesinger’s film hints at why the British New Wave withered so quickly when the Pop Revolution arrived. Of all the films in the ‘kitchen sink’ school of the early 1960s, only one, Billy Liar (1963), really prefigures the massive thump sideways that British culture – and hence British film – was about to get later in the decade. In British film as in pop music, the late 1960s and 1970s marked a watershed of shifting cultures and identities, as Mark Sinker discovers in a selection of the era’s ‘forgotten’ films
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