Barney Platts-Mills’s 1969 feature about aimless East End teenagers in love comes to Film Forum after a cinematic rediscovery.
An auspicious first feature, Barney Platts-Mills’s “Bronco Bullfrog” fell between the cracks — a belated example of British “kitchen sink” naturalism that arrived in 1969 before the wave of disaffected youth films by Mike Leigh and Alan Parker.
Still, the writer-director Platts-Mills lived to see his movie restored and revived, if not to enjoy its American rediscovery, heralded by a weeklong run at Film Forum in New York.
Platts-Mills intended “Bronco Bullfrog” as a British equivalent of Italian neo-realism: A cast of nonactors recruited from the streets of London’s depressed East End enact a story that might have been their own. Indeed, the movie grew out of a short documentary, “Everybody’s an Actor, Shakespeare Said,” that Platts-Mills made about an improvisatory workshop established by the radical theater artist Joan Littlewood in the neighborhood.
The camera tilts down from smoky factories to a world of grimy alleys, dreary housing projects and aimless teenagers, who are introduced smashing into a cheap cafe to find nothing more than a few pence and some stale cakes — the first of many disappointments. A similarly barren establishment is where diffident Del (Del Walker), 17, an apprentice welder with a bad Beatles haircut, first courts discomfited Irene (Anne Gooding), a gawky 15-year-old schoolgirl in a micro mini.
The couple’s awkwardness is compelling. According to Platts-Mills — who at 25 wasn’t much older than his actors — the movie was largely improvised because the cast hadn’t bothered to read the script. Del and Irene are frequently at a loss for words but, in the Littlewood tradition, Platts-Mills gives their relationship a Shakespearean framework. Irene’s mother loathes Del as instinctively as Del’s father hates Irene. What brings the couple closer is precisely their inability to find a place to be together.
The fantasy of escape is underlined by the movie’s title. Bronco Bullfrog (Sam Shepherd) is the neighborhood hero — newly escaped from reform school to embark on a dead-end career of petty larceny. Del and Irene suggest lumpen mods; Bronco is a suedehead with wide suspenders and polished work boots. He has style but no sense, happily hiding out amid cartons of stolen consumer goods he is unable to fence.
Movies are part of the daydream. In a rare liberating moment, Del pays for a movie ticket then opens a theater’s side door for a small crowd of crashers that includes a jolly grandmother. A corresponding scene has Del and Irene venture into London’s West End to discover they don’t have enough money to see “Oliver!,” a candy-color musical treatment of criminalized youth.
Platts-Mills’s film is unpretentiously atmospheric: The thick Cockney accents require subtitles, and Audience, an East End prog band, supplies a credible score. Its understatement impressed the New York Times critic Roger Greenspun who, appreciative, wrote that, “It takes a while, with ‘Bronco Bullfrog’ to realize that you are witnessing a love story, so free is it from the rhetoric of love, or love stories.”
“Bronco Bullfrog” is essentially a study in frustration — economic, sexual, even cosmic. (Del matures at the very moment that his life unravels.) But its bleak ending is mitigated by the energy of the cast and the spirit of the filmmaking.
Bronco Bullfrog
Plays Friday, March 25 through Thursday, March 31 at Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
