Book Rummage - 7: New Cinema In Britain

Time we turned our attention to the 'arts' section of charity stores. Don't start getting too hot under the collar, though...

NEW CINEMA IN BRITAIN
by Roger Manvell
(Studio Vista/Dutton, pub 1969)
This is a good book to leave lying around. Lots of photos from films that are never on TV, like The Penthouse and Decline And Fall of A Bird Watcher, not to mention Mia Farrow in Secret Ceremony. A photograph from the middle film features a woman having a bath on top of a giant plaster hand, the champagne on ice: should be in the MOMI, really, under movements in cinema. The book cover is a rather crude cut out of David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave frolicking in The Touchables. Frolicking is, of course, something people didn’t do until the 1960s, because it was outlawed. The design of this book is very aesthetically pleasing: a similar sort of glossy photographic paper as John Berger’s classic deconstruction of art criticism Ways Of Seeing, and not much text either. Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe And Find True Happiness? asks one film title (directed by the suave gent Anthony Newley who was married to co-star Joan Collins at the time), so maybe this is a book of criticism as well. The text is brief and to the point, and very much of its time: discursive without being entertaining. Actually New Cinema is so 60s, it scares us, but even so, the beautifully reproduced B&W photos from films like Ken Loach’s bleak Poor Cow, the hideous overblown early rock opera Privilege starring Paul Jones, and Albert Finney’s masterly Saturday Night Sunday Morning – plus a host of others – makes us want to book a series of 60s films at our nearest art house cinema now. That would be the Duke Of Yorks, then. So be it.
Cost: 49p
Bargain value: 9 (for the photos alone)
Cover: 7 (nice picture of Larry Olivier in The Entertainer on the back)
Author’s authenticity count: 6 (he was also responsible for New Cinema In Europe and New Cinema In USA)