But this stark tale of shattered lives in satellite towns feels raw and concrete in the best London-movie tradition.
Some elements are dated, but it’s a film that dared to speak up and now serves as a fascinating time capsule.‘Mind the doors!’ You may never travel on the tube again after watching this gruesome but unexpectedly moving London cannibal flick, in which a murderer stalking the Underground tunnels is revealed to be a childlike mutant man-eater. Try another?
James Fox is a gangster forced to hide out in the crumbling west London home of a washed-up singer played, rather beautifully, by Mick Jagger. We already have this email. As well as predicting the carve-up of the old East End and the rising tide of Thatcherite capitalism, Barrie Keeffe’s virtuoso script also includes some of the finest lines a Cockney ever spoke. Dirk Bogarde plays Melville Farr, a married barrister whose secret romantic friendship with a young man exposes him to blackmailers. The familiar clichés, satirised in Private Eye’s ‘It’s Grim up North London’ cartoon strip, suggest it is populated by rich, pretentious champagne socialists and media lefties – not people you would want to see on the big screen for two hours. Comedian Joe Cornish’s directorial debut takes the low-budget thrills of ’80s straight-to-video horror and marries them to the bolshy wit and realism of sarf London youth movies. It’s not easy watching, and it’s sweary as hell (82 instances of the word ‘cunt’, apparently) but it packs an almighty emotional wallop, has some incredible performances and never wavers from showing the horrors of poverty, violence and addiction.Aswad frontman Brinsley Forde plays Blue, a black British teenager who can’t get ahead because the system – in the form of racist cops, government cuts, job shortages and Mel Smith – won’t let him.
I love all things London & your instagram account is so fun & informative. 9. The film offers a window on another world, and that’s what makes it enduring. Don’t bother with the ’90s De Niro remake: this is the real deal, guv’nor.‘Queen Elizabeth is a man! Films Set in London. Victorian England.’ Mystical explanations aside, David Lynch’s statement in The ultimate London movie – a tale of rock stars and thieves, creativity and confusion, drug-fuelled fantasy and hard, ugly reality.
I would add Page Eight (part 1 of the Worricker trilogy, a BBC film series starring Bill Nighy) to your list. One part of London that’s not as familiar to most people is Hounslow (well, apart from the fact that Heathrow is there), and it’s the setting of This movie about two girls playing soccer (er, football) is one of my favorite films set in London, not least because the creative story was such a sleeper hit.A young boy becomes friends with a man who’s stuck in boyhood, and locations as far flung as Kentish Town, Clerkenwell, I was going to try to choose one James Bond film for my list, but the truth is that almost every James Bond film has great footage of London.
First of the bunch was this mist-shrouded silent masterpiece, in which Ivor Novello plays an innocent man who happens to bear a striking similarity to a murderer targeting young blondes.Isolationism is a proud British trait, as we’ve seen in the past year or so.
Comedies, sci-fi thrillers, horror films and romantic tales set and filmed in London.
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Following an upper-class society bride whose nocturnal lesbian fantasies lead her into a world of killer kaftan-clad hippies, creepy psychoanalysts and disembowelled dogs, it’s unforgettably freaky.Made six years before the law decriminalised homosexual acts between men, ‘Victim’ is a tense suspense film set in a world of oppression.
Richard Widmark’s fast-talking American hustler Harry Fabian is a classic noir type, but he’s hopelessly out of his depth in the rundown streets of the post-war West End. Lots more London—from Hammersmith to Belsize Park—features throughout.