Original subtitles

NARRATOR: When we hear the word "film",

it's hard not to think, "Hollywood."

STIRRING MUSIC

Although many countries have their own thriving native film industries,

and some eclipse Hollywood in scale and output,

when we think of English-speaking cinema,

we rarely think of the United Kingdom first.

But Hollywood's roots are inextricably intertwined

with the UK, and, well, why don't I show you?

RECORD SCRATCHES

SCREAMS

I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.

Your winnings, sir. Oh, thank you.

Yes, the last man who said that to me was Archie Leach,

just a week before he cut his... Is that so?

Well... Well, play something, somebody!

GASPS

You are to shoot the presidential nominee through the head.

Rogue One. May the Force be with us.

I'm good, actually.

So, why a modern history of British Cinema?

Because the years that we're gonna look at, from 1960 onwards,

are really the ones in which cinema, as we now know it, was formed.

Despite our rich filmic heritage,

to our modern eyes, romance doesn't look like this.

Action doesn't look like this.

And this, as wonderful as it might be...

# And you want To look your best... #

..doesn't really make us laugh any more.

# Then you'll know You've properly dressed... #

So what does make us laugh these days?

How about this?

There's a wider joke to Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy

than just the genre-spoofing slapstick and quick wit

that's so beloved by British cinemagoers.

The joke is how preposterous it looks

to see suburban Britain through a mainstream cinematic lens.

Greater London as the backdrop to an action-packed zombie apocalypse.

Morning.

A bullet-ridden John Woo-style cop flick

taking place in Somerset.

A full-on alien invasion in the Home Counties.

The joke of all jokes here is the gentle mocking

of the British film industry's apparent lack of either ambition

or ability to offer a robust alternative

to the big budget, high concept American films

which have dominated our own cinema screens for decades.

Where's Lurch? He's in the freezer. Did you say, "Cool off"?

No, I didn't say anything, actually. Shame.

And it's a fair cop.

What even is British cinema?

Is it cinema which is made in Britain?

If so, can we lay claim to Star Wars?

Is it cinema which takes place in Britain?

If so, must we accept ownership of Three Men And A Little Lady?

I need a drink.

Is it cinema made by a British director?

If so, can we take Frankenstein?

Is it cinema produced by a British company?

If so, is The Big Lebowski to be seen as our own?

What is a British film?

Don't ask me. I've... I haven't a clue.

How do you define Britishness?

What I don't think it is

is looking to another country for the impetus.

I think most filmmakers would say

they're not defined by their country,

but by their intention to communicate.

There is Hollywood, and there is World Cinema.

And World Cinema is what we are part of.

I think a British film is one which springs from the culture

and the experiences and stories and comedy

and way of life of the people who live in this...

On this land, in these islands.

Can be landscape, can be language. It's mostly about character.

I think there is quite a distinct character.

It's about Britain, it's made by British people,

it's generally with American money.

I haven't a clue. I can't do better than that.

Like the conflicting ideas in every pub in the land

of what makes a person British or not,

to label a film as British is both simple and not simple at all.

Whether it's the international funding

of both the bespectacled big bastards of British cinema,

Harry Potter and Richard Curtis,

or the fact that some of the bedrock films

of British cinema were directed by immigrants.

Or the understanding that some of our most talented filmmakers

did their best work in other countries,

focused on other cultures.

What I really want to tell you is the story of the change.

From the old to the new.

But where to begin?

The River Thames.

The river runs right through the middle of central London,

and during World War II,

its South Bank there was bombed to hell.

For half a decade, it was just rubble and dust,

until Clement Attlee's new Labour government

ordered a big party there.

NEWSREEL: 'This is the Festival.

'Something Britain devised halfway through this century

'as a milestone between past and future

'to enrich and enliven the present.'

The Festival was a huge success,

with a dome of discovery, pleasure gardens,

and huge displays of arts, science, architecture and design.

And film.

A year later, when the Festival packed up and disappeared,

one of the few buildings left on the massive site

was that Telekinema.

It was given to the BFI

and reopened a year later as the National Film Theatre.

Britain now had a focal point and a national base for film culture.

It attracted the greatest filmmakers from all over the world

to screen their films and discuss their work.

The programming was exciting and varied,

and it was a place where cineastes could revel in film history

and experience the cutting-edge of modern cinema.

One of the programmers at the BFI,

the people who decide what's going to be shown,

was this chap, Karel Reisz.

And in his spare time, he made films.

Karel's filmmaker pals, some of whom had received bursaries

from the BFI's experimental film fund,

were making work similar to his,

and one day, his friend, Lindsay Anderson,

suggested that all of their work was similar enough

that perhaps Karel could programme an evening of it.

On that Sunday, in February 1956,

the National Film Theatre showed a programme of three short films.

This one, O Dreamland, by Lindsay Anderson.

This one, Momma Don't Allow, by Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson.

And this one, Together, by Lorenza Mazzetti.

That bloke right there, that's Eduardo Paolozzi.

He did that amazing mosaic mural in Tottenham Court Road tube station.

Anderson, always the disruptor, gave the event a name, Free Cinema.

He wrote a manifesto and declared it a movement.

And so Lindsay wrote this manifesto out,

and Lindsay was always writing manifestoes.

There was a book called Declaration,

which had manifestoes from Lindsay, from John Osborne, all those people,

But it... That was very much the mood of the times.

And it worked. It worked really well.

Every Free Cinema screening sold out,

and these unknown amateur filmmakers

were suddenly in all of the newspapers and on TV.

Britain was ready for something new.

Arguably, British cinema had not kept pace

with the revolutions in art, literature and music.

But when Anderson announced the arrival

of what would become a New Wave, people listened.

Or watched.

So, what was free about these films?

They were made outside the system,

they weren't designed to be commercial or reportage,

but they were, in their own way, political.

Actually, films should be about serious things,

and they should be about social values, and they should be personal.

You know, they were attacking, as it were, the cinema of papa.

The establishment films.

They were concerned with the marginalised,

the working class and the disabled.

They rejected artifice and the sentimental.

They portrayed real people in real-life situations

and gave them a sense of dignity.

Or, at least, set them within less constructed reality.

Some of these filmmakers are going to make a big splash

once the '60s roll in.

But the first film of that wave, the British New Wave,

did not stem from Free Cinema.

These feet are about to give British cinema

the biggest kick up the bum it's ever had.

Room At The Top is the story of a young working-class man

from a northern industrial town

with a determination to rise above his station in life.

It wasn't until right at the end of the '50s, really,

with Jack Clayton's Room At The Top, that there was a sudden shift,

and here was a film, ostensibly, about real life,

which is to say about working-class life.

This is Laurence Harvey. The film made him a big star.

But he seems to be barely remembered these days.

His performance is charming in the reckless role of Joe Lampton,

who manages to ascend to the heights of society,

driven mainly by resentment and vitriol.

His open pursuit of the daughter

of a particularly wealthy and influential businessmen

causes much dismay,

and when he finally stakes his claim at the top,

it's at the price of losing a different woman.

One he has truly fallen in love with,

played by French actress Simone Signoret.

Please walk away now.

The film was nominated for six Oscars and won two,

Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actress for Signoret.

Think of me.

All of those so-called British New Wave films

were all adaptations of plays or novels.

They were not, in that sense,

as far as I was concerned, pure cinema.

Room At The Top was adapted from a book,

but the films which were to follow

came from the popular movement blowing apart British theatre

known as kitchen-sink drama, and the writers behind it,

who are known as the Angry Young Men.

John Osborne was very angry.

He was angry about his parents, angry about his schooling,

angry about politics,

angry that he was living in a tiny flat in Derby,

and particularly angry about his wife shagging the local dentist.

It was the dentist situation

which inspired him to write his first hit play,

Look Back In Anger.

The play premiered at the Royal Court Theatre.

It was directed by Free Cinema co-founder Tony Richardson.

It was a huge success, and Richardson,

hoping to capitalise on this

and try his hand at a feature film, sought investment.

What he found was a tubby Canadian producer

called Harry Saltzman,

an old-school hustler with a hundred crazy schemes

who'd spent his youth in the circus,

and now, in his 40s, was seeking his fortune in the arts.

He was about two years away from becoming significantly wealthier

than pretty much anybody else in the whole of British cinema,

but we'll get there in a bit.

Saltzman, Tony Richardson, and angry John Osborne

formed a film company called Woodfall Film Productions

to bring Look Back In Anger to the screen.

Although Look Back In Anger would be the catalyst

for the British New Wave to really take off,

it's never been a favourite, critically.

Burton was a bit too old and a bit too established for the role,

and although you can see signs in Richardson's direction

that he's trying to do something original

through the use of locations,

the addition of a sub-story concerning immigration and racism,

it's all a little too pedestrian. A bit safe.

The following year, the first of a new decade,

Woodfall would blast the doors of the British New Wave open

with Karel Reisz' feature directing debut,

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning.

Albert Finney was an entirely new kind of screen presence.

Raw and animalistic.

There were no clipped accents or Queen's English here.

It was set, and mainly shot, in Nottingham...

Mind what you're doing...

..and was thick with the voice and culture.

..gonna get a good rattling one of these days!

Where Look Back In Anger

had shied away from actually breaking taboos,

this film was heavy with sex and hedonism,

and tackled the subject of abortion,

which was still illegal at the time in Britain, head-on.

She made me sit in a hot bath for three hours

and I had to drink a pint of gin. I'll never go through that again.

It was terrible. I thought I was gonna die.

The film was very successful in many ways.

It remains a British icon, and its influence is spread wide.

Tony Richardson's next film was to break even more taboos.

A Taste Of Honey was the first of the kitchen-sink dramas

to not feel like epic tragedy, but to dance with spirit.

For a film dealing with the triple whammy of outsider issues...

Geoff got it. ..teenage pregnancy,

race...

Tell me what you do. ..and homosexuality...

Go on, Geoffrey, I've always wanted to know about people like you.

Go to hell.

..rather than illustrate these issues with screaming drama,

Richardson did something far more radical -

he treated them with lightness.

He allowed a pregnant teenager, Black man and gay man

to all act with a casual likeability

which challenged the social stigmas that surrounded them,

yet never shied away from them.

The play which it's based on was written by Shelagh Delaney,

19 years old at the time.

She co-wrote the screenplay with Richardson

and rightly has her name above the title on the film poster.

That anyone could produce such an accomplished piece of writing

at the age of 19 is impressive, but Delaney was something else.

Born in working-class Salford, she was inspired to write

by what she saw as the unfair depictions

of sideline cultures within theatre.

Casting unknown Rita Tushingham in the lead as Jo

was a bold and inspired move.

The lack of formality in the performance

is replaced with an emphatic honesty.

This is also the film in which Richardson came alive as a director.

It was the first British film ever to be shot entirely on location,

and this backdrop, combined with the free-moving camera work

and the unstuffy performances,

heralded the true arrival of the British New Wave.

The principles of Free Cinema were employed in a narrative framework

and the result was an exhilarating experience for the audience -

fiction in a documentary style.

British cinema was absolutely moribund,

it really was, so the things like Saturday Night And Sunday Morning

and A Taste Of Honey, they were revelations,

cos here were ordinary people, you know, who had ordinary...

..problems that you could relate to.

You know, a lot of British films before that

are, you know, people with white telephones...

POSH ACCENT: ..and they all talk like that.

And anybody with an accent, of course, is low comedy

cos they're too insensitive and too stupid

to feel, erm, any real feelings.

Room At The Top, Saturday Night And Sunday Morning,

A Taste Of Honey, and Woodfall's next film,

The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner,

all performed very well at home and abroad.

Many in the British film industry paid attention to this movement

and tried to emulate the success Woodfall were having.

This oddity is Spare The Rod.

That is, of all people, Max Bygraves,

as a teacher who finds himself assigned

to an inner-city London school

where the kids are a law unto themselves.

Settle down to some work, and pull your socks up.

LAUGHTER

It managed to raise a few teenage issues,

but never quite made its protagonist rounded and human enough.

And, hey, fun fact, that little brat

ended up playing Boba Fett in the Star Wars films.

The point is, inspired either by art or commerce,

other people were trying to emulate social realism.

Change was happening.

This handsome devil is Dirk Bogarde.

He was, to use the term lost to film history,

a matinee idol.

He was charming and sexy and star of the Doctor films,

starting with this one, Doctor In The House, in 1954.

But come the '60s,

he used his position to affect genuine social change.

In 1961's Victim,

he plays a respected, respectable London barrister with a secret.

If I hear from you again, I shall call the police.

Do you understand? That's absolutely final.

When his male lover is targeted by a blackmail ring,

he puts everything on the line to bring them to justice.

And I remember when they said,

"You do understand that, you know, Barrett was a homosexual?"

You could've heard a pin drop.

That word was never, never used.

And that was a revelation -

"Oh... God, there are people like me around."

And it's a wonderful performance, and it was very brave.

It helped change the law. How many films have done that?

Joseph Losey was a Hollywood filmmaker.

He escaped to Europe during the Communist witch hunt

by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

He and Bogarde had worked together previously

on 1954's The Sleeping Tiger, but in the '60s,

his work with writer Harold Pinter and actor Bogarde

would become the most significant of his career.

In The Servant, James Fox stars

as a young society man who hires Bogarde as his manservant.

Slowly, the power dynamic in their relationship shifts,

offering a shocking commentary

on the state and future of the English class system.

It also displayed a more ambitious visual language

to the starkness of social realism.

In retrospect,

the... what was called social realism at the time,

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning,

and A Kind Of Loving, and This Sporting Life, and so on,

they were set in the North, Northern working class.

You know, suddenly they'd discovered

there was a working class in the North

and they were fit, suddenly, for films.

There were West End actors going up there,

there were directors who went off to Hollywood

or back to the theatre.

There was no commitment to working class life on cinema.

It was a fashion, and the fashion soon faded away.

Three. Take one.

Bryan Forbes. Perhaps no single person

better embodies the spirit and opportunity

of the British film industry in the 1960s than this guy.

Forbes was an actor in the '40s and '50s

mainly small roles in war films,

but he was also a writer.

One of his books brought him to the attention

of an American film producer who had relocated to London,

Albert "Cubby" Broccoli,

who gave Forbes his first shot at screenwriting.

His screenwriting career blossomed through the '50s,

but he knew that, to really achieve his goals,

he needed to produce his own films.

Richard Attenborough.

As an actor, he played two of the nastiest characters

in British cinema history -

the acid bath murderer John Christie,

and teenage gang lord Pinkie Brown.

He even once got punched by John Wayne.

See?

To a middle-aged audience, he is the Oscar-winning director

of epic biopics such as Chaplin,

starring Iron Man, and Gandhi,

starring... the bad guy from Iron Man 3.

I've made the argument, and I... and I stand by it,

that every single person working in the British film industry,

and television industry,

a portion of their weekly or monthly income

is directly related to the impact and influence

of Richard Attenborough.

He's the one that drove through the John Major decision.

He's the one, more than anybody else,

that helped construct with Gordon Brown

the tax shelter arrangements.

Er, he's the one that helped save BAFTA.

Pretty remarkable.

Forbes and Attenborough formed Beaver Films,

named in reference

to that particular mammal's capacity for work.

Their first film was The Angry Silence.

Written by Forbes, produced by the pair of them

and starring Attenborough, it tells the story of Tom Curtis,

a factory worker who breaks the picket line

of an unofficial strike and is sent to Coventry when the strike ends.

Recognise that beautiful thug?

It's Oliver Reed's first ever credited film role.

All right, let's get to work.

The Angry Silence is certainly a working class story

and concerned with the outsider, but has been widely criticised

for making an enemy out of the union, often the only thing

the working class could actually depend on to represent their needs.

Those critics missed the point.

It was the corruption and violence the unions were subject to

which were being criticised,

but the film remains unfairly tarnished nonetheless.

Beaver Films' next production,

directed by Forbes, was to become a perennial British classic,

Whistle Down The Wind.

Alan Bates, as a fugitive on the run from a murder charge,

holes up in a barn in Lancashire.

Local children, filled with stories from the gospels,

mistake him for Jesus

and subsequently hide and protect him.

The style, as with The Angry Silence,

was on the cusp.

It didn't have the anger or modern aesthetic

of the other British New Wave films, yet, in its own way,

it was quietly revolutionary.

I've brought you your book.

It managed to question the role of religion within modern society

whilst telling a story gentle and eloquent enough

for a conservative audience.

Whistle Down The Wind was a bridge from the old to the new,

rather than the chasm which the Free Cinema brigade

were daring the bold to jump across.

The next Beaver film, again written and directed by Forbes

and produced by Attenborough, continued this important approach.

The L-Shaped Room didn't shy away from the reality of social realism,

but chipped away at the central taboo -

pregnancy out of wedlock - with manners rather than hammers.

He's in a hurry, doesn't want to miss Christmas.

Now, you stay there. I'll be back.

Now, let's get a train back to Waterloo Station.

A new face on the British New Wave scene

was TV director John Schlesinger. His acclaimed short film Terminus

was a little late for Free Cinema,

but was clearly cut from the same cloth.

He teamed up with producer Joseph Janni,

an emigre from Mussolini's Italy

with a passion for producing meaningful cinema.

And they cast Alan Bates in their first feature, A Kind Of Loving.

They were rather surprisingly funded by Anglo Amalgamated,

a company more famous in the UK

for producing B-movies and the Carry On films.

If you don't know what a Carry On film is, then here we go.

They were a series of films released between 1958 and - ouch - 1992

with a recurring cast and recurring very specific tone.

Characterised by extreme physical comedy

and an inexhaustible supply of innuendo,

the series was a bawdy look at British society

and satirised the full spectrum of cinematic genres.

They were hugely popular and successful,

but we don't really like to talk about them now.

Rank stupidity.

But A Kind Of Loving was very well observed.

It spoke to a generation of young people

in a rapidly-changing world,

questioning the true values of old world morals

and the emerging culture of consumerism

and working class betterment.

This is really important because it wasn't just film that was changing,

society was changing.

The seeds had been sown when World War II ended in 1945.

Winston Churchill was decimated in a landslide election

and Clement Attlee's incoming Labour government

introduced reform on a huge basis.

The new welfare state,

with its free National Health Service,

nationalised public services and National Insurance programme,

created stability.

Then the incoming Conservative government of 1951

put great focus on the clearance of the slums and welfare accommodation,

or council housing.

All of this, combined with the Education Act of 1944,

which opened education up more fully to all children,

saw a generation of mobilised,

educated and employable young working-class people

coming of age in the '60s.

They had confidence, money and aspirations,

and just as cinema was developing a voice for the working class,

the working class changed.

And as much as they might have felt isolated and othered,

they wanted to have some fun.

Tony Richardson was ahead of the game with this,

and in 1963, he had John Osborne adapt Henry Fielding's 1749 novel

The History Of Tom Jones, A Foundling, into...

And they did it... CLICKS FINGERS

..in colour.

Gone was the kitchen-sink,

but despite being draped in period costume,

it's a film about social mobility and hedonism.

It's bawdy and fun,

and once again, Richardson innovated his way through

with characters talking to the camera... Help!

..and even this.

Albert Finney became both an international star and a millionaire

due to his profit share.

Tom Jones put British cinema on the map in that moment.

To make such a bold and colourful film,

Richardson had put together a large group of financiers.

The largest part came from an American studio, United Artists,

and when the film went on to make almost 40 million at the box office,

Hollywood's head was turned towards the Atlantic.

Also in '63 came John Schlesinger's next film, Billy Liar.

There are some films

that you go and see at the cinema

and you have forgotten about the movie

as you're leaving the cinema.

And then there are other films

where, like, you have seen them once when you were young

and, like, frames of it are burned into your brain.

So, Billy Liar is a film that I have only seen once,

when I was a teenager,

and yet I think, subconsciously,

it's come into so much of my work.

I feel like what he does in that film,

even just that one scene of Billy Liar turning around

and miming a machine gun...

WOMAN: Get dressed.

..and that match cut,

that has, like, stayed in my head forever.

And I think bits in Spaced,

or in all of my movies, like,

you can probably trace it back directly to that.

At first, it might appear to have

all the trappings of the kitchen-sink genre -

isolated young man,

played by Long Distance Runner star Tom Courtenay,

in a grim northern town, dreaming of better things -

but in Billy Liar, the dreams were actually shown to us.

It's social realism doused in hilarious fantasy.

Billy's fantasies are not contained in his head.

He lies to everyone around him - his family, his employers,

the two girls he strings along.

Well, have you told your mother and father yet?

Er, we'll announce it when you come for your tea tomorrow. All right.

The idea of the fantasist in movies

goes back to, like, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd

and Charlie Chaplin and so many others,

or other things that I remember as a kid,

watching The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty,

but what Billy Liar does is it starts to bring in

that kind of British New Wave, like, style,

and it's starting to bring in, like, jump cuts.

Like, you know, there's obviously a lot of British filmmakers

who have seen something like Breathless

and had their minds blown

and start to then bring elements of that

into things that are very British.

Like, Keith Waterhouse's script is quintessentially British

and yet it's got this kind of, like, cutting-edge,

new European influence in it.

Then along comes Julie Christie.

She'll become an icon of the decade,

and this is the moment the world discovered her.

Will you marry me? Yes, Billy.

Julie's character, Liz,

offers Billy everything he dreams of -

marriage to a beautiful, free-spirited girl

and an escape from his humdrum life to the excitement of London.

But what happens when they get on the train?

Wait a minute, er, there's a milk machine

on the station. I can go and get you some.

I don't really want any.

No, it'll only take a minute. Save my place.

Well, hurry up, Billy!

TRAIN HORN BLARES

We'll come back to this moment, but the point right now is that,

three years into the decade, social realism had moved on,

which was a bit of a shame for Lindsay Anderson

because when he finally made his great kitchen-sink drama,

This Sporting Life,

the genre was, for now, kind of done.

That said, it's generally regarded as the best of the lot.

It made a star of Richard Harris, too.

Of course, social realism wasn't the only thing going on in cinema.

Although it was becoming more mainstream,

the actual mainstream had plodded along happily

until one day, in 1962, this happened.

GUNSHOT

An iconic opening to the most iconic franchise in British cinema history.

Now, maybe you recognise those two names.

Harry Saltzman, co-founder of Woodfall Films,

and Cubby Broccoli, Bryan Forbes's first champion.

These two North American hustlers had joined forces

when they discovered they both had a passion

to bring Ian Fleming's James Bond to the cinema screen.

In some ways,

Connery's Bond spoke to the Billy Liars in everyone.

Bond.

James Bond.

Young British men didn't necessarily want to see the grim realities

of their daily lives on the cinema screen.

This was their big escape.

It was international,

it was sexy,

it was huge.

Although Connery was a more old-school model of sophistication

at 32,

it spoke to an audience of all ages.

The post-war baby boom generation, who were in no hurry to grow up,

were reminded of the Saturday matinee serials

they saw as children.

This had all of the thrills, spills and cliff-hangers,

but it also had the adult overtones of genuine danger, violence and sex.

Bond was an instant cinematic icon.

Dr. No was released in October 1962.

In March 1963, British pop culture was about to be rocked once more.

It's not exactly original

to point out that The Beatles changed the world in many ways,

but they also had a big impact on cinema.

When it came to make their film,

the obvious choice was an American director living in London,

Richard Lester.

What I love about his '60s movies,

A Hard Day's Night, Help!, The Knack,

erm, Petulia, The Bed Sitting Room,

How I Won The War,

is just, like, this explosion of ideas.

And he's one of those directors who...

There's no sort of boundaries to anything.

It always feels so gloriously untethered,

that anything is possible.

A Hard Day's Night, although a scripted, fictionalised film,

was infused with the influence of cinema verite

with hand-held cameras and spontaneous-feeling action.

It almost felt like documentary at times.

The film, designed to merely exploit the recent success of The Beatles,

was, in itself, a triumph.

Lester's technique of editing the footage to the beat of the music

was a revelation.

The entire grammar of how music videos were constructed

has been credited to it,

and a spate of similar films followed.

Every big band would want one.

Ferry Across The Mersey, starring Gerry And The Pacemakers.

Catch Us If You Can, starring The Dave Clark Five.

This one was directed by John Boorman.

More from him later.

But one of the biggest impacts A Hard Day's Night would have

was to contribute to a growing global realisation that,

with the best music, the best fashion,

the hippest photographers and writers and clubs,

London had become swinging.

This notion that London was the coolest

and most happening city on Earth was to fuel the cultural economy.

With the massive success of Tom Jones and Billy Liar,

and the world's focus on London, American movie studios

began investing heavily in films made there,

aimed at a young adult audience.

The perception of swinging London fuelled the reality of it.

From all over the world, and especially all over the UK,

young people flocked to the capital to seek fun and fame.

When Julie Christie got on that train at the end of Billy Liar,

she took British cinema with her.

She left behind the drab kitchen-sinks of social realism

and arrived in the hedonistic fantasy of Carnaby Street.

Her next film, directed by John Schlesinger,

was Darling...

..and saw her cast as a jet-setting model

living life on the edge.

ENGINE REVS, TYRES SCREECH

There she is with Laurence Harvey,

whose previous alter ego, Joe Lampton, from Room At The Top,

was also now living in swinging London

in the film's sequel, Life At The Top.

Oh, they're not such a bad lot.

They're shallow, gross and selfish.

Christie was becoming an icon, a face of the era.

She was influencing fashion.

And, of course, swinging London

was finding its own male film stars, too.

London-born Terence Stamp

had wowed audiences with The Collector...

I want you to be my guest.

..whilst fellow working-class thesp Michael Caine

created the era-defining title role of Alfie.

Rita Tushingham dazzled

in Dick Lester's The Knack... And How To Get It

and then exploded into colour with Lynn Redgrave

in this film, Smashing Time. Oh, we're here, we're here!

Wake up, Brenda, we're here!

Smashing Time's evocation of swinging London

is perhaps the ultimate realisation

of the fantasy that London was selling

and the world was buying.

But another film was set to adrenalise that fantasy

and take it a lot further.

Modesty Blaise could have, should have

been the biggest British film of the '60s.

Produced by Joseph Janni,

with Joseph Losey in the director's chair,

it starred Terence Stamp and Dirk Bogarde

alongside Italian actress Monica Vitti in the title role.

Everything '60s is here.

The James Bond influence is obvious.

It had the biggest budget, the greatest director,

the hottest stars and the wildest realisation

of the fantasy of swinging London,

but it wound up a barely-remembered footnote.

Perhaps the notion of a female James Bond was too challenging,

or perhaps the pendulum

was swinging away from the heady joys of swinging London,

towards the darker side of those same streets.

One thing of note about the end of Smashing Time

is that the two young pleasure seekers go home.

I've still got them, Yvonne.

Still got what, Brenda?

Our return tickets.

Smashing. Let's go home, then.

The reality of London after hours

was a shock for many who arrived looking for the party.

This is a different view of swinging London.

Soho, nine thirty in the morning.

Look at this cinematography.

Documentary style to ground the fiction,

it was shot by Austrian immigrant Wolfgang Suschitzky,

a socialist Jew who fled Austria in the 1930s

and made a home here.

He brought to British cinema the gritty, unflinching eye

of a long-time photographer and documentarian.

This film, The Small World Of Sammy Lee,

was written and directed by Ken Hughes,

but it was elevated by Suschitzky's tense, knowing photography.

In this film, the glamour of Soho is a thin veneer

and instead, we see it as a claustrophobic,

cynical collection of clubs and cafes

where everyone knows everyone else's business.

Anthony Newley plays the title character,

and when his spiralling gambling debts are called in...

Of course, I'll get it. I don't make jokes, mister.

..he has five hours to beg, con and worm his way out.

No, I'll bet you don't.

The Safdie brothers claim not to have been influenced by it

for their film Uncut Gems, so we'll call it a coincidence,

but here it is, almost 60 years earlier -

a more realistic portrait of Soho.

The seedier side of Soho

was not immune to the profits promised by cinema.

Sex films, or stag films as they were known,

were being churned out from its upstairs rooms

and windowless basements.

Somewhat bridging the gap between porn and the mainstream

was this film, 1968's Her Private Hell,

awarded with the questionable accolade

of being the UK's first sex film with a narrative.

You did it.

It's far from being a great film, but it wasn't supposed to be.

It was profitable. And this was the feature film debut

of Britain's own exploitation maestro,

the Gentleman of Terror,

director Norman J Warren.

Argh!

Remembered fondly by all as a polite, encouraging

and avuncular figure, he would go on to create

some of the seediest horror films of the '70s.

And talking of exploitation, what did the 1960s have to offer

in terms of horror and sci-fi?

We did get, from Jack Clayton, director of Room At The Top,

The Innocents,

an adaptation of Henry James's The Turn Of The Screw.

Look at the photography

by the legendary cinematographer Freddie Francis.

CLOCK TICKS

The way he uses space and light in the huge CinemaScope frame.

The incredible use of deep focus.

I can't, I can't! I plead it! She's dead. You know you can see her.

I can't, I can't!

Look at these bizarre, yet effective, cross dissolves

created by the editor, Jim Clark.

At times, up to four separate images superimposed over each other.

A huge technical achievement for the era of photochemical processing,

long before digital.

You must remember, it's a secret.

And the sound design.

A very early appearance of synthesised electronic sounds

by Daphne Oram, one of the co-founders

of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Coinciding with, but very much removed from,

the social realism movement had been this film,

Village Of The Damned.

Originally developed as an American film,

and very in keeping

with that Cold War era sci-fi threat of the unknown...

You're going to have a baby.

Whose baby?

..MGM transferred production of the film to the UK

due to pressure from religious groups

unhappy about its inclusion of virgin births.

Handsome, isn't he?

It was rewritten to be located in the UK

and became very much its own unsettling thing.

But like The Innocents, this very much remains

an isolated, interesting piece,

rather than part of a movement of change.

MGM also gave us The Haunting in 1963.

Still acknowledged by some as one of the scariest films ever made,

and a masterpiece in less-is-more directing

from Robert Wise, whose next film was...

..The Sound Of Music.

Oi!

Not exactly scary,

but perhaps the most unfairly overlooked exercises

in British terror remain Britain's only ever attempt

at the kaiju genre,

Gorgo and Konga, ripping off Godzilla and King Kong respectively.

Has London ever been destroyed in a more enjoyable manner than this?

There goes Piccadilly Circus.

Cinema was certainly getting stranger.

One of the most curious films of the decade,

probably one of the best,

was the next film from Free Cinema's Karel Reisz.

Morgan - A Suitable Case For Treatment

is a complex film disguised as a silly film.

On the surface, a wacky comedy about a crazy man

trying to win back his estranged wife,

it's also a film about mental health and how a rigid society

both creates and rejects any form of neurodiversity.

It is, in fact, a film many decades ahead of its time...

Fire! ..and at the heart of the film

is darkness.

My name is... WOMAN: Alfie!

..Alfie.

Alfie seems to be remembered as a more jolly film than it is.

It's one of Michael Caine's iconic roles.

Although we find him at first embodying the young male fantasy

of hedonistic detachment, the fantasy turns dark

as he finds himself physically and mentally unwell,

lonely and empty.

I got a bob or two,

some decent clothes, a car.

I got my health back, and I ain't attached.

By the end of the film, he's had a philosophical awakening

and, like so many of his generation,

was starting to realise what was truly important.

But I ain't got my peace of mind.

And if you ain't got that, you ain't got nothing.

1968's Up The Junction

tells the story of a Chelsea socialite

who longs to experience real life.

She gets a job in a sweet factory,

only to find herself trapped in a world of malaise,

backstreet abortions,

fights, crime and punishment.

Ultimately, she sees the man she loves

get jailed for stealing a car

in an attempt to appear good enough for her.

Oh, I'd much rather have gone by bus.

Yeah... that's your trouble.

And in the same year,

Lindsay Anderson returned to the cinema

for the first time since This Sporting Life

and burnt the bastard down.

If.... was unlike anything that had gone before,

a bellowing howl of pain and fury

against the establishment he had grown up in.

It shows how three public schoolboys,

sick of the system, launch an armed insurrection

against the school.

It's a film giddy with fantasy,

and by the time of this mass shooting at the end,

the viewer is left unsure as to whether what they're seeing

is supposed to be happening or just in the mind of its protagonist.

Recently, I watched If....

and thought the fantasy sequences were rather good,

better than I'd realised. So that very much came from him,

so it wasn't sort of part of a wider movement.

But it was a vivid, angry and unique film

which would launch its star, young Malcolm McDowell,

into a long and illustrious career.

If the fictional characters were getting sick of the myth

of swinging London and the wonderful '60s,

imagine how actual filmmakers were feeling.

This is Charlie Bubbles,

a work of sheer exasperation

from writer Shelagh Delaney

and, for the only time in his career,

director Albert Finney.

Finney plays Charlie, a best-selling young author who is bored of it all.

Bored of the money, bored of the fame,

bored of the business and bored of London.

He is utterly disconnected from his emotions and numbed by life.

He decides to drive up north - Liza Minnelli there -

to see his home town and visit the wife and child he abandoned.

It's an odd film.

Part '60s swinger, part road movie,

part heavy kitchen-sink.

It has perhaps the most insouciant ending in cinema history.

Charlie just walks out of his wife's house,

sees a hot air balloon, climbs into it and flies away.

Charlie wasn't the only one getting rich and flying away.

By 1968, 90% of all British films released in British cinemas

were American-financed.

British talent was starting to cross the pond.

John Schlesinger was on his way over and would, by the end of the decade,

win an Oscar for directing Midnight Cowboy.

Whilst British style was popular in America,

the studios kept funding films here,

but, generally, these films weren't making them much money.

These were the burning embers.

America was about to have its own pop culture revolution,

and 1967's Bonnie And Clyde

was finally the catalyst for Hollywood's own New Wave.

The last of the '60s British films Hollywood funded

were often predicated on the cachet of the artists involved,

rather than the quality of the productions themselves,

which were getting... stranger.

Remember Sammy Lee? Well, Anthony Newley,

now a very successful singer-songwriter,

was given free rein as a writer-director-composer-producer

on his opus - deep breath -

Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe

And Find True Happiness? # Piccadilly Lilly of my own

# Yes, sir

# So when... #

Look at it!

Here's another bit.

FAIRGROUND MUSIC PLAYS

It gets worse!

It has been said that the film was so bad,

Newley's wife, Joan Collins, left him because of it.

Maybe due to him casting her in a part named Polyester Poontang.

He barely appeared on a cinema screen again

until his final starring role in...

My God. Long time, no see.

NARRATOR SIGHS

..The Garbage Pail Kids Movie in 1987,

and that was far worse than it sounds.

See also the ultimate British power couple,

Liz Taylor and Dick Burton,

and when their power was let run wild, Boom.

Boom has long since passed

into the hallowed halls of kitsch cult.

These films were not hits.

American studios began selling off their British assets,

shutting down their sound stages here,

recalling their executives and downsizing their London offices.

So, as we find ourselves at the end of the decade,

Charlie Bubbles drifting away in a balloon

seems a fitting occurrence

as numbness, dissolution, surreality and burnout

all hang heavily in the air.

But that's not quite the end of the story.

We haven't talked about the last film of the '60s.

It's the last film

because the studio itself found it so shocking,

it didn't release it until the '70s.

Nicolas Roeg, a camera operator and cinematographer of some repute.

He'd shot sections of Lawrence Of Arabia

and Doctor Zhivago, and had worked with Tony Richardson

on his adaptation of Far From The Madding Crowd.

In 1968, he co-directed Performance

alongside Scottish artist-turned- filmmaker Donald Cammell.

Performance is a mind-bending '60s swinging London story

in which the worlds of Soho criminals

and hippie rock stars mix in a haze of sex, drugs

and lost identities.

Co-star James Fox was so rocked by the experience,

he took a lengthy sabbatical from acting

and became an evangelical Christian.

We'll see more from Nic Roeg in the '70s,

but look how far we've come.

There is nothing about Performance, from the acting to the camerawork,

to the story, to the music or the editing,

nothing which could have been predicted

as part of British cinema ten years previously.

Is this the end of our story?

Almost, but not quite.

Because in the last year of the decade,

there were some new seeds growing in the fertile soil

of these monumental times for the British film industry,

and they're coming from somewhere slightly less radical

than their predecessors' routes.

A generation of new film directors is springing up from television,

some from drama, some from documentary.

But as the revolutionary directors of the New Wave are now commanding

unfeasibly large salaries and exploring careers in Hollywood,

producers are looking for competent and affordable replacements.

Now, there is this guy, Ken Russell,

but... I haven't got the energy

to even begin to explain Ken Russell to you,

so... let's save him for the '70s.

This might be a familiar face.

It's the other Ken of British cinema, Ken Loach.

Loach had come from regional theatre and got his break with the BBC,

directing films for The Wednesday Play series.

His films for the series

were heavily weighted with a social message.

The most famous of them is this one, Cathy Come Home.

It shocked and surprised audiences.

A young couple who descend through the system as they lose their jobs

and have more children,

until they find themselves at the desperate edge of poverty

and lose everything.

A shocking story,

erm, and it caused, erm,

quite a... quite an uproar.

The fact that children were taken away

because people were homeless

caused an outcry.

There were questions in Parliament,

and we were asked to go and see the Minister of Housing,

erm, a Labour man.

Labour was in power. It was Harold Wilson's government.

And the man, erm...

You know, he said, "Oh, it's a great contribution

"to understanding the problems of homelessness."

So Tony Garnett and I went

and, erm... we said,

"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

And he said, "Well, on the one hand, you know,

"you have the problems of this,

"and on the other hand, you have the problems of that."

And it became clear he wasn't going to do anything.

It starred Carol White,

a tragic figure in British cinema

who also appeared in Loach's first cinema film, Poor Cow.

Carol was brilliant, and very, very touching.

Because she was young and pretty, she was called the Battersea Bardot.

She did some films here, and then she went to America.

They do what Hollywood does. You know, they exploited her,

they... destroyed her, really,

and she died very young, erm,

in a motel in Florida, I believe.

And we were in touch from time to time

and I kept saying, "Carol, come home.

"They don't know who you are, and they don't care."

Poor Cow also starred Terence Stamp

and tells a familiar '60s story of disillusionment and abuse.

Argh!

What's particularly interesting about it is Loach's approach.

What you're filming should look as though it's just happened,

just happening in front of your eyes.

It should be like a good musician, a good pianist,

who sits down and plays...

Well, there's a word for it. Sits down and plays an impromptu.

And it should be like the pianist that sat at the...

sat on the piano stool and thought, "I'll just play something."

And he just plays, and it comes straight from their mind

and their imagination.

And a film should be like that, if it's purporting to be real.

And so to improvise

and just slightly shift the words around sometimes

will help you to capture the sense of the spontaneous.

We changed the way of making...

of making what the BBC called drama

and what we ended up calling films.

We wouldn't have put the camera in the streets.

And TV drama was like theatre,

in studios, with big, heavy cameras that trundled around.

And it didn't have the flexibility and the vitality... that we wanted.

In Poor Cow, we can see traces of Free Cinema,

and in some ways, it was picking up the baton of social realism,

but Loach was doing something more.

The original social realists,

Anderson, Reisz, Schlesinger and their cohorts,

had been keen to give a voice to the outcasts of society,

but they had largely moved on to explore their own art.

Loach, and his producer, Tony Garnett, wanted to do more.

They wanted to actually effect change.

They were not content to evoke a feeling of isolation.

They wanted to show the reality of what happens to the people

who fall through the cracks of society,

in a harrowing, realistic documentary style,

and shock people into actually doing something about it.

Loach and Garnett's last film of the '60s

remains one of the most beloved films of British film history.

Kes is one of the rare moments of Loach's career

in which he swaps literal for lyrical.

In telling the story of a young working-class lad in Yorkshire

who finds escape from the pressures of family,

school, poverty and society,

through his friendship with a wild kestrel,

Loach tells the story of the working class experience.

The story was just, erm...

..just absolutely central to everything we wanted to do, really.

A working-class lad,

erm, a talent no-one could see.

Erm, the mining village,

the countryside,

the, erm... the school,

which we weren't so far out of at that time.

Erm, everything rang true.

Very funny writer,

but absolutely truthful to his call.

It's a beautiful, brutal film,

and the genius in it is the simplicity

of both the storytelling and the message.

Nobody who has ever seen Kes

has walked away from it in any doubt as to what Loach is saying -

that a whole section of British society

is damned from the start,

and that even the dream of escape or beauty is ultimately futile.

And perhaps that is the story of British film of the 1960s.

A spark of light which looked like it was going to change everything,

and did, but, ultimately, having burnt down

everything which went before, was left in a place of darkness

and disillusion.

The '70s would be a very different decade for cinema.

In some ways, darker.

In some ways, far, far lighter.

But look at what was achieved before that.

Look at the beautiful camerawork...

..the spontaneity and life of location filming.

No!

The crackling performances of a new generation of actors

who could reject the formality of what had gone before

and be allowed to truly shine.

The colour and the anger. Shut up, will you?!

And the desire to kick in the doors and knock down the walls

and move cinema somewhere else.

Somewhere better.

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