Cinema Year '25: June Discoveries

The Boy Friend / The Man Who Knew Too Much / 28 Days Later

Welcome back to Cinema Year ‘25, a monthly review supplement. June’s discoveries took us from deeper Russell research, to a film print with a shady past, to a Danny Boyle DV classic. Words by Blaise Radley, Ben Flanagan, and Kirsty Asher.

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The Boy Friend (Ken Russell, 1971, UK)

We’ve got Ken Russell on the mind at CYZ this month (I wonder why), so what better time than now for me to rectify my many, many Russell blindspots? Of course, 1971 is most remembered by Russell heads for a certain infamous nunsploitation flick, but the fascinating push-and-pull of his directorial style is arguably most evident in his chintzy, bombastic, and inevitably quite fantastic adaptation of the 1953 stage musical, The Boy Friend. Newcomers be warned: bawdy queer-coded humour, exaggerated make-up, and flamboyant tap dancing abound.

In something of a rite of passage for a Russell picture, the behind-the-scenes of The Boy Friend is dominated by tales of clashes with studio execs, ending in MGM heads cutting twenty five minutes for the film’s release in the US. As Russell himself put it so eloquently, “A gorilla in boxing gloves wielding a pair of garden shears could have done a better job.” Restored to its former garish glory, it’s still far from readily-legible, an adaptation within an adaptation where the drama on stage seeps into the actors’ lives, and where the director daydreams of the kind of lavish musical productions Russell himself clearly adulated. Consider it one of cinema’s most confounding and loud love letters to being wonderfully annoying. BR

The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1934, UK)

The second BFI Film on Film festival went down a treat on what was then the hottest weekend of the year. How naive we were. Where the previous edition had a wealth of 3D and nitrate goodies, this year’s big ticket events were original prints of Star Wars (1977) and the Twin Peaks (1990) pilot, ostensibly for the public but really, for the donor/freebie class. The festival proper had more than its fair share of gold, with each screening preceded by a lengthy introduction on the status and background of the print by the BFI archive team. This gave proceedings the atmosphere of a conference for dweebs, but there are a lot of this type in London.

The most interesting intro was undoubtedly that for The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). A print that, per the stamps on its body, moved through and potentially screened in Nazi Germany. This would be apt for a film whose antagonists are a conveniently non-specific enemy of the state (though almost definitely Communists, to my reading). They are headed up by Peter Lorre’s star turn—even watching him drink from a glass is thrilling.

And for a star plucked seemingly directly from his turn in Lang’s M (1931), Hitchcock delivers the most Langeo-Feulladian work of his British period, with a bleak underbelly exposed through a labyrinthine plot that takes us from Switzerland to Limehouse, to around another corner in Limehouse. It even climaxes with a fight upon rooftops. I love seeing the urban gunfights in films from this period—always static, arranged around the proscenium with actors firing rifles out of windows to the offscreen world. If access to this special film is what exclusive opening and closing nights pay for, then so be it. BF

28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002, UK)

Having previously only seen 28 Weeks Later, (2007) which, despite a breathtaking opening scene has an unpleasantly mid-00s Hollywood chrome palette, it was fitting to finally watch the film that started it all ahead of Boyle’s new sequel. My only frame of reference was the image of a confused Cillian Murphy standing on a desolate Westminster Bridge wearing hospital scrubs, calling out ‘Hello!’ to anyone who might still remain. Surprised was I, then, to find a film that is less a zombie flick and more a soul-searching journey through national consciousness, made at a time where the UK was on the cliff edge of a cultural capital built, in part by Boyle, over the previous decade.

It is fascinating to trace Boyle’s trajectory from this film to his Olympics Isles of Wonder (2012) opening ceremony, both of which utilise Henry Francis Lyte’s Bide With Me for emotional impact. Here, it is to accompany a desolate walk to Deptford via the abandoned DLR railway line, in Isles of Wonder it is to commemorate the 7/7 bombing victims. In between lies a melancholy outlook on Britain’s triumphs, and how its tragedies are so often of its own making, echoing a helplessness of how to confront such a conflicted national past and present—“What would you do with a diseased little island?”

Alex Garland’s screenplay takes the lyrics from Lerner and Loewe’s Wand’rin’ Star (1951) that “Hell is in hello” in humorous earnest for the film’s final scenes, as a shot of the former is transformed to the hopeful latter in a stitched together rescue sign for passing helicopters. That Blighty optimism punctuating the thought that civilisation, or at least British civilisation, is both a curse, and also the only thing we can cling to. KA