mcevoy-jg

Written by the brother of a future prime minister, Now Barrabas is a fairly risible prison drama with progressive elements in the script. It's unashamedly sentimental in parts, giving each prisoner in a selected group a chance at redemption or not. Mostly it's interesting because it features early performances from two future stars - Kenneth More and Richard Burton. More plays fairly to type - a light-weight fantasist who drifts out of the film early on. Burton plays an Irish terrorist in a performance so grim that he's excruciating to watch. For all that, he's still the best thing here.

Not recommended unless you enjoy a good wallow.

A left-wing theatre group stage a moderately successful musical show which attracts the attention of an ideologically committed celebrity and her fellow travellers. She promises great things, both box office and revolution, but her meddling brings disaster to the group.

Amusing and at times biting satire on the state of pastime socialism in 70s Britain. The show within the show outstays its welcome, but the subsequent ideological coaching of it is spot on. It all ends badly in a miners' club in New Brighton, where the group find that revolution has been and gone.

Splendidly performed by all and tightly paced and directed. I remain astonished that such odd productions ever made it onto telelvision; more proof that the 60s and 70s really were the welfate state of British TV.

There are some pretty awful failed utopia tracts out there and The Giver is among the worst of them. The film misses no cheap shot, from killing babies to daily injections to supress emotions. An underwhelming lead actor and sub-par performances from Bridges and Streep add to the lacklustre atmosphere. The pacing is ponderous and reverential. This has all been done before in various forms, from Logan's Run to Harrison Bergeron.

Like many modern films, technically accomplished - the main problems lie in the source material and the script, which refuse to depart from the tropes of a tired and much abused genre.

I'm not sure this movie plays straight with its audience, which might be a development of noir styling. Who knows? Rather than a simple story of a cop getting a witness to safety so she can testify, it seems to be a tale of police incompetence. The lead cop, played by Charles McGraw, is clearly inept, leading not only to the death of his partner but also of the female decoy (played by Marie Windsor and easily the best performance in the film) he's been provided with. McGraw is so incompetent that his abandonment of his decoy to her fate only leads to further complication when the real witness is taken hostage in her train compartment. This could all be deliberate and the film could be a clever study of a police pan badly unravelling, but I doubt it. This is a nasty film undeserving of its high reputation and best avoided.

The Carlion family are aristocrats undergoing a crisis on the very night of the Labour Party's historic 1945 landslide election victory. They clan are meeting to chose a replacement as the heir has been killed on active service. As if to presage things to come, a group of workers and travelers occupy the family stables and the police seem reluctant to move them along. As the scale of Labour's victory becomes clear, the family treats it as a declaration of war upon them and resolves to fight back.

Rather a heavy-handed script by Trevor Griffiths, heavy on symbolism. The film's main interest is its timing - produced and broadcast in 1981, it seems to be a comment on the Thatcher regime's resumption of class war following 35 years of uneasy political consensus. Another clever touch is that the Carlions are not old money - they made their millions as beer barons. Well worth seeing if you can find a copy.

A word about Play for Today. In the early 70s the British film industry died, largely due to changes made in funding arrangements by the then Conservative government. The BBCs Play for Today strand took up the mantle of British cinema. Many of its productions were handsomely mounted, shot on film stock, and featured star actors of the day. Not to mention the fact that many emerging writers and directors and technicians cut their teeth on these films. As these productions represent the British film industry of that period, they should be released instead of languishing in the BBC archive unseen for generations.

Documentary film-maker Steve Jackson inadvertently captures footage of Sarin gas being transported into an unnamed African nation for use against the majority population. The regime's agents trail Jackson to London with orders to retrieve the film at any cost. Jackson's attempts to evade them and to use the film politically result only in tragedy.

Another interesting entry in the BBC's long-running Play for Today anthology series; stand-alone dramas which often proved controversial. Number on End is a thriller by nature and is filmed as such. The plot hints at a greater conspiracy with Jackson as an unwitting dupe. Ultimately well-served by its performances, direction and location filming.

This remarkable and rarely seen film chronicles the first public display of the Shroud of Turin for many years, back in 1978. It details the symposium set up to establish the Shroud's authenticity, and tells the history of the Shroud from its discovery, through its various owners and its many brushes with destruction, as well as giving a fascinating insight into how the Shroud came to be photographed - by an amateur, who discovered it to be a negative photographic image which turned positive in his darkroom. This was disputed for many years as an amateur's error until the Shroud was photographed by a professional in the early 1930s, with the same results.

The Shroud is, of course, the image of a man, purportedly Jesus of Nazareth, emblazoned on a length of cloth, 14ft long. The markings indicate that the man has been scourged and crucified, and that he appears to be wearing a crown of thorns. No scientific explanation has been forthcoming as to how such an image came to exist on the cloth, and there are no means of duplicating the process. Even the 1988 Carbon-14 dating of the Shroud to the 13th century could not account for the fact of its existence.

This film is a reverent affair and treats the subject with respect - it serves not only as a travelogue of the Shroud and its history, but of Turin and the pilgrims who made the journey to see the relic in 1978. The film is also graced by a striking and dramatic narration by Richard Burton, whose voice is so invisibly mended that it might as well be that of the Shroud itself.