Hello!

Steve Guariento forwarded this link to a ‘Classic British Telly’ YouTube encoding of an entire BBC production from 1965, George Orwell’s 1984.

I’ve only had a chance to see the first five minutes. It looks very polished, with the progressive graphics we expected from the BBC back then. It’s technically an episode of ‘Theater 625’ and stars David Buck, Jane Merrow ( The Lion in Winter) and Joseph O’Conor ( Gorgo).

The script is basically the same as that for a famous 1954 BBC broadcast that made a TV star of Peter Cushing. The writer was none other than Nigel Kneale, of the Quatermass productions. Kneale contributed a second teleplay to the Theater 625 show, entitled The Year of the Sex Olympics.

This link is to an Imogen Sara Smith article posted on Criterion’s page, on a subject that always grabs me — movies by blacklistee directors like John Berry, Joseph Losey and the focus of this article, Cy Endfield, that back in the day were sometimes labeled ‘anti-American.’

Now mostly known for his epic  Zulu, Endfield delivered a one-two punch of features in 1950 that still make one’s skin crawl, in no small part because the ‘social issues’ his writers lament are now in the news every day. The article discusses  Try and Get Me! (aka The Sound of Fury) with Frank Lovejoy and Lloyd Bridges, the equally disturbing  The Underworld Story with Dan Duryea, and Endfield’s searing English attack on capitalist greed, Hell Drivers.

Ms. Smith’s essay is a good entryway into a subgenre that makes us wonder if civilized values exist anywhere: “There ain’t no law against what’s right!”

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson