chew very much

I posted about this film Charlie Bubbles (1967) once before in a Hardly Baked series called "Odd Little Films" which only got to one post before sputtering out. The idea was that it was to be a celebration of the sort of movies that - while they may be minor or even not very good -  linger in your memory. It might even be for just one or two scenes. They stay with you longer and more plangently than the sort of films that are well-made, obviously excellent, have a message or a point, etc etc. . 

In this long-ago post, I lamented not being able to find online a particular clip from it that I had never forgotten and whose "naturalism" seemed very striking. 

Albert Finney directed the film as well as playing the titular character: a Northern working-class best-selling novelist (probably modelled on Keith Waterhouse or Alan Sillitoe, someone like that). In the scene in question. Bubbles is gone back to his hometown (Manchester clearly, although I don't think it's ever said) to visit his young son and his ex-wife (played by Billie Whitelaw - wonderfully cross, tenderness glinting out through the sternness despite herself). He's left them comfortably off, so they live out in the countryside now - she's into keeping chickens and free range, organic stuff, making jams etc. She  keeps a good table and, noticing that Bubbles is looking a bit sallow and under the weather,  fixes up some hearty grub in the farmhouse kitchen.  Finney munches away at this big bacon sandwich and there is a protracted stretch of chewing that goes on for about two whole minutes. Although his mouth is full he keeps taking big bites out of the sarny - it's a thick home-baked bread and he's masticating away,  hamster-cheeked. The shot even follows through to him cleaning out his molars with his tongue for those clingy bits of granary crust and bacon rind.

Well, after that big build-up, now you can see this scene! At 1.04.17

From Angry Young Man to... Hungry Middle Aged Man

Another good scene - which immediately follows the Protracted Chew - is when Bubbles takes his little boy to Old Trafford to watch a football match. Being a celebrity bestselling novelist, a hometown lad made very good indeed, he's given the red carpet treatment - he and his son, decked out in football fan regalia, are ushered to a director's box, with bird's eye view. But it's remote and insulated from the crowd fervour of the stands, which is where the boy would much rather be. It's a poignant little scene. 

I really like the whole film -  the delicate balance maintained between quirky and gloomy.  The atmosphere is soaked in the ennui of the novelist, who's got everything he ever wanted (money, acclaim, fame, a swanky ultra-modern pad in London) but lost what he had. There's an of-its-time blend of realism and surrealism to Charlie Bubbles that sits it competitively alongside Blow-Up (also about an archetypally Sixties figure  of working class success - in this case, the Bailey-style star photographer - for whom the striving and the spoils alike become meaningless). 

redazzled

 

munmusik (häpnadsväckande!!)

 

mindblowing in case you are wondering what häpnadsväckande means

look like a jolly bunch!

More from the album

more from Bengt

and has stuff on these comps

avant intro

 just the first 15 seconds of this Play for Today from 1970

and again

Another brief avant-y intro

And one more time for this much more relaxed, nostalgia-tugging later intro 

A different arrangement of the same tune, with horns

 

vaporwave in advance

 

the video, not the music

certainly it seems like it could easily be some kind of foundational visual text for your Oneohtrixes 

(via Simon Price, who had some completely other comments on Fbook to do with the voice and the song thematics, relating to a kind of all-grown-up-now syndrome that befell Sixties and early '70s rock veterans, itself overlapping with the phenomenon of Divorce Rock)

fringe benefits (slightly less slight return)

 

And some meta-theatre - Come The Revolution, a 1977 BBC Play for Today about a radical theater group. Shades of Citizen Smith in the satire here.

The main actor, Richard O'Callaghan, was involved in fringe theatre himself, performing at spaces like the Almost Free Theatre in Dirty Linen

LeCaine in the membrane