The Other Side of London
A number of films have depicted the underbelly of the city away from the familiar tourist sites. Examples of these include Up the Junction, Nil by Mouth, Dirty Pretty Things, and two out of every three films directed by Mike Leigh. The East End meanwhile, was shown in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Waterloo Road (1944), It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and A Kid for Two Farthings (1955), among others.
The 1968 documentary The London Nobody Knows, presented by James Mason, attempted to show some unfamiliar aspects of the city, as did Patrick Keiller's 1994 documentary London. This approach has since been emulated by the Saint Etienne films Finisterre (2002) and What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? (2005). The latter attempted to capture the state of the Lower Lea Valley prior to its transformation ahead of the 2012 London Olympics.
Other films have tried to use less familiar locations in a new way. The 1995 version of Richard III, starring Ian McKellen, which is set in a fictional 1930s fascist version of England, makes imaginative use of London locations such as St Cuthbert's church, St Pancras chambers (the old Midland Grand Hotel), the University of London's Senate House, and the two Gilbert Scott power stations — Bankside serving for the Tower and the decrepit Battersea Power Station as the setting for the final battle scenes. Terry Gilliam's 1985 Orwellian fantasy Brazil also used the cooling towers of the same power station as a location, as did Michael Radford's 1984 film version of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
London Kills Me (1991) portrays the city's immigrant and drug subcultures in the early Thatcher years, in a similar vein as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). The 2007 film by Ken Loach It's a Free World... considered the ethical dilemmas behind London's vast trade in illegal workers.
The acclaimed 1996 film Beautiful Thing depicted the lives of two gay teenagers living on the South London housing estate of Thamesmead. Similar themes, as well as race, were part of the 1970s set Young Soul Rebels, the debut of Derek Jarman protege Isaac Julien (1991).
Breaking and Entering, a 2006 romantic drama, by Academy Award-winning director Anthony Minghella, shot and set in King's Cross, a blighted, inner-city neighbourhood of London, examines an affair which unfolds between a successful British landscape architect and a Bosnian woman – the mother of a troubled teen son – who was widowed by the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Read more about this topic: London In Film
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