The film If.... (1968) is about three senior boys, Mick Travis as the charismatic leader and Johnny and Wallace as his willing accomplices. As cadet soldiers, the three friends mutinied and killed their commanding officer, a sadistic teacher who abuses junior boys. This chapter discusses Anderson's autobiographical contributions to the film's script, the film's production and promotion, and the critical success of the film.

In April 1975, Joseph Losey officially became a tax exile after relocating himself from Chelsea to Paris because of tax problems. In his The Assassination of Trotsky and Les Routes du Sud, the two political exiles, Leon Trotsky (walled up in his Mexico City compound) and Jean Larrea, Semprun's French-based Spanish loyalist, are reduced to mere shadows of their former selves and they led hermetic lives of purely textual production. Much of this dearth of topical relevance is rooted in Losey's own exile, in particular his lack of active political affiliation with the British left, as well as his estrangement from working-class culture as a whole. By 1976, Losey had settled into the non-activist niche of 'personalized politics'. He admitted that his youthful need for the ideological safety net of a rigid political organization had been replaced by a more fluid political contingency.

A film such as Go Now, made for television but shown in cinemas in some countries, is a case in point: it exhibits some of the informing traits of melodrama but its treatment is in certain essentials realistic, avoiding the gratifications of melodrama, at least as the mode is practised in Hollywood cinema. With or Without You raises expectations of romantic comedy but deflects - or dissipates - these with a surprising acridity of tone; and the noir-influenced I Want You hovers between thriller and erotic drama. Realist sex and concert scenes, to the point where there is almost a whiff of documentary in the film's short footage, but it also has a vestigial narrative continuity. As in so many of Winter-bottom's films, there are insistent stress on movement, an almost mandatory beach scene as a somewhat simplistic signifier of release and 'naturalness', and stress on music.

Part five reviews some highlights of medieval Genoese history by teleologically addressing the city’s nature and size (qualis et quanta) at the time of its foundation, in the time of its growth, and in Jacopo’s own day (‘at the time of its perfection’).

As Louis Malle was to himself admit, he once held complex cultural affinities with the radical right-wing, although these were in themselves subtle and ambiguous connections. This chapter discusses Ascenseur pour l'echafaud, Les Amants, and Le Feu follet in the light of this admission. It also offers an opportunity to analyse Malle's political journey from the cultural right-wing to the libertarian left, to explain how Le Souffle au coeur marked a radical break with the 1950s by speaking of that era through a comic mode. A brief résumé of the basic plots of Les Amants, Vie privée, or Le Feu follet confirm Malle's propensity for active pessimism. The conservative portrayal of women in his cinema remained relatively stable throughout the oeuvre. Malle's films of the 1950s converged with the world of the extreme right-wing literary tradition, often loosely defined as 'the Hussard' movement.

Robert Bresson's refusal, from Journal onwards, of professional actors is of a piece with his rejection of psychology and character. Lacanian discourse has a complex and multiply determined relationship with Catholicism, and Bresson has the reputation of being the cinema's greatest Catholic director. If two of Bresson's first three feature films, Les Anges du péché and Journal, take the religious life as their setting, that life, like the God that is its ostensible inspiration, subsequently dwindles to near-invisibility. Few Catholic artists, however, have found the institutional life of 'their' Church a congenial or inspirational topic, and its declining importance in Bresson's later work is not of itself particularly surprising. Pascal's wager on the existence of God has what contemporary linguistics might call a performative effect, for it is only thanks to the wager that God's existence becomes certain and available to the believer.

There is a large chronological gap between Joseph Losey's first American staging of Galileo in 1947 and the release of his filmed version in 1974, reflecting almost thirty years of frustration on Losey's part, in terms of both finding financial backing for the picture and obtaining English-language rights from Bertolt Brecht's widow. In the 1974 film, people are in no doubt that beneath the dialectical surface of ethical and political responsibility lies the immanence of nuclear destruction itself. Losey equates this 'road to perdition' with both time and space, expressed through sound and depth of field. The tolling church bell, a favourite Losey device for expressing the immanence of ineffable time, runs throughout Galileo as a leitmotif signalling the crystalline nature of the scientist's twin multiplicities. Losey produces a less ambiguous effect from his use of depth of field.

This chapter discusses The Aachen Memorandum (AM) (1995) by historian Andrew Roberts as a paradigmatic example of one important branch of Eurosceptic novels. It analyses the novel as a dystopian narrative that depicts the European Union as a dys-EUtopia, set in a future where Britain has become an undesirable and unpleasant place that shares salient features with the dystopian societies of Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World. The chapter argues that Robert’s influential novel takes an extremely Eurosceptic perspective, extrapolating the EU’s integration efforts and policies into a totalitarian means of control through constant surveillance, propaganda or the re-writing of history. The chapter illustrates how the Eurosceptic novel actively promotes national identity and sovereignty, drawing upon a storehouse of Eurosceptic tropes and repeating a certain nationalist version of British history that sets Britain against a EUropean Other. Expressing and disseminating widespread Eurosceptic fears, Roberts’s novel thus anticipates Brexit.

Robert and Raymond Hakim gave Diego Buñuel the opportunity of working with Catherine Deneuve on Joseph Kessel's scandalous 1929 novel Belle de jour, a book that caused as much uproar on publication as the first screening of Un chien andalou. The Hakim brothers offered him the luxury of a ten-week working schedule on what was to become only by then his third film in colour. The darker shades of the Deneuve persona are in even greater evidence in Tristana. The juxtaposition of the images of femme fatale and virgin mother recreates the ambivalent treatment of women in western culture. Catherine Deneuve, both as Tristana and as ' Belle de jour', allowed Buñuel to indulge an incurable fascination with the ice-maiden prototype, that incarnation of a fantasy of Olympian pallid aloofness so fitting for demystifying the equivocal sensibilities of the threatened male.

Based closely on his own successful stage play, Lee Thompson's Murder Without Crime is a confident but largely unadventurous first step in film making. Lee Thompson clearly signposts Murder Without Crime as a tall story, a macabre entertainment with enough Grand Guignol to grip the spectators in the stalls and enough ironic self-awareness to please the more intellectual patrons in the circle. Lee Thompson's debut box (or ottoman) of tricks went out on the ABC circuit as a double bill with an American film about a GI finding romance in Europe, Four Days Leave. Although the cutting room remained sacrosanct, directors of Lee Thompson's generation had more influence over the final cut of a picture than their predecessors. The Yellow Balloon may be frustratingly limited in its social critique, but as a piece of film making it was rightly praised for its performances and technical proficiency.

The success of Britain as a supranational state rested on subjugating England and Englishness to the British project and in preventing English distinctiveness, maintaining itself and emerging from under the cloak of the British project. This chapter explores the factors and debates that influence the nature of local government in England. The 1992 Local Government Commission rejected the production of a national unitary blueprint for local government and recommended a mix of unitary and two-tier councils. The chapter sets out a case for a new constitutional settlement for the UK; one which develops from the localities upwards and which sees political power and democracy, governance, and representation. Anglo-Saxon England, for administrative, governing and military purposes, was divided into shires, hundreds and burhs, which rested within the original Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Toulmin Smith emphasises the key characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon approach to the localities, primarily small territorial units, governing themselves.

The Old Crowd was one of the six plays written by Alan Bennett for London Weekend Television. This chapter discusses the collaboration of Bennet and Lindsay Anderson in the adaptation of The Old Crowd into film. It also discusses the promotion of the film, the critical reaction of viewers and Anderson's reactions to the critics.

This chapter introduces Jean Renoir's life and his highly uneven career. It demarcates his vision of his films, craft and ideological evolution and draws substantially on his writings and interviews. Renoir was born in 1894 in Paris, and his first project was Catherine ou une vie sans joie for which he hired Albert Dieudonné to direct his wife. As he made films addressing different audiences with varying degrees of freedom in shifting production and socio-historical contexts, the chapter identifies the periods when the contextual factors remained relatively stable. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, mon père is the text most frequently drawn upon to fill in his early years. Renoir celebrated the popular commitment that led to the victory of the revolutionary armies against the Prussians at Valmy. His discussions of cinematic creativity during the Popular Front period are an intriguing blend of left-wing collectivism and inherited definitions of the creative process.