Barney Platts-Mills: Return of the Mods

A forgotten gem of Sixties British cinema is seeing the light again. Bronco Bullfrog, acted by amateurs and directed by a drop-out, has been screened at the National Film Theatre and is out on DVD. Matthew Sweet spoke to the director

In October 1970, a low-budget film shot by a 25-year-old British director with a cast of amateurs opened at the Cameo Poly in Oxford Circus. Critics covered it with garlands. "It sends your heart leaping," wrote Alexander Walker, with uncharacteristic gaiety, in the London Evening Standard. "A smashing and pretty sobering cockney film," chirped Penelope Gilliat in The New Yorker. John Russell Taylor of The Times offered the most muscular enthusiasm. "A piece of neo-realism far more rigorous and effective than anything the Italians attempted even in the movement's heyday," he wrote. "One can only hope it is given a chance to reach the audience it deserves."

It wasn't: 18 days after its opening, Bronco Bullfrog was pulled from the Cameo to make way for Laurence Olivier's The Three Sisters (1970). 200 members of the Beaumont Youth Club in Leyton turned up to protest, jeering the premiere's royal guest as she trolled up the red carpet. "Princess Anne Met by Skinhead Mob at Film Premiere," boomed the Daily Telegraph, though she can't have felt very threatened: the following week, she accepted an invitation from one of the leads to see the film at the Mile End ABC.

The following year, Bronco Bullfrog was screened at Cannes. In London, it won a Writers' Guild Award. After which, the picture receded into oblivion. Never listed in Halliwell, it has been screened only twice on British television. Then, in the mid-1980s the master negative was thrown on a processing rubbish tip. "Fortunately one of the graders saw it there, and picked it up and sent it to the archive," recalls its director, Barney Platts-Mills."Otherwise the negative would have gone forever. Film is a very ephemeral business. Here today, gone tomorrow."

Now Bronco Bullfrog is making a comeback. Last week it was screened at the National Film Theatre to an audience which included Platts-Mills, two members of the cast, and the musician Paul Weller, a long-time admirer of the film. It will be shown again in August, as part of the Mods and Rockers season. Platts-Mills, who wisely retained the rights, has also brought it out on DVD. After decades of obscurity, Bronco is ready to take its place among the key films of the period:A Taste of Honey, Kes, If..., Charlie Bubbles.

The morning after the NFT screening, I meet Barney Platts-Mills at his basement office on the Portobello Road. I'm lucky to catch him. By the time you read this, he will have taken up residence in Larash, a Moroccan fishing port where he intends to chivvy local actors into taking part in his elaborate opera project, The Aviators. If it proves financially viable, he may also turn it into a digital movie.

Platts-Mills owes his film career to his dad. The late John Platts-Mills was a celebrated QC – defender of the Krays and the Great Train Robbers – whose parallel life as a Labour backbencher was curtailed in 1948, when his name appeared on a telegram of support to the Italian socialist leader Pietro Nenni. Attlee expelled him from the party which, one supposes, gave him more time to go to the cricket where, in 1960, he met the film director Lewis Gilbert, and asked him if he had any ideas about to do with his 15-year-old son, who had just run away from public school with only two O-levels to his name, and was threatening to become an actor. "You don't want to be an actor," advised Gilbert. "You want to tell them what to do." And, with a casualness that now seems incredible,Gilbert wangled the boy a job at Shepperton studios, where, in the lowly role of third assistant editor, Platts-Mills performed minor razorings upon The Greengage Summer, Spartacus and A Kind of Loving.

"While having this rebelliousness and determination in himself," he says, "my father sent us all to public schools and Sunday school. I was even in the choir. So I emerged a typically confused English person. And I think Bronco is a product of that. What's best about it and what was best about my dad is humanity."

For the rest of the decade, Platts-Mills' career was characterised by a peculiarly 1960s mixture of egalitarianism and privilege. He edited World in Action documentaries for Granada, and bought himself a Victorian racing yacht with his fee. He moved into the orbit of Marlene and John Fletcher, acolytes of director Lindsay Anderson, who were making their own contribution to the Free Cinema movement by shooting a short starring the boys of a Paddington youth club. Platts-Mills, intoxicated by the notion of "accessible, free, working-class cinema," formed his own company, Maya Film Productions, with the assistance of Nicholas Gormanston, the Premier Viscount of Ireland. ("Fortuitously," he says, "all my business partners were millionaires, which helped in getting bank loans.") However, it was Joan Littlewood, the theatre practitioner who created a cultural revolution on the other side of London, who put him on the road to Bronco Bullfrog.

In a 30-minute short, Everybody's an Actor, Shakespeare Said, Platts-Mills documented Littlewood's drama workshops at the Play Barn, a draughty hall at 48 Martin Street, E15. Littlewood, he recalls, treated him with suspicion, and made frequent scornful references to "kunstlichers" and "do-gooders". ("She was very vain," he remembers, "and quite rightly so. Like all directors, she thought that anyone who did anything other than what she'd suggested were damned fools.") Before the pair fell out, he filmed her boys as they improvised scenes from their lives.

The most striking sequence in Everybody's an Actor is an interview with Del Walker, a 16-year-old apprentice plumber who was one of the mouthiest of Littlewood's group. Walker explains his attendance at the Play Barn. "It's better than hanging about the streets," and we hear the voice of Platts-Mills: "Is that all you did before?" Walker looks at him as if he was some clueless toff come east for a gawp. "It's all I've ever done. Stratford, Plaistow, Greengate, East Ham, Chingford, everywhere." Then the smile bleeds suddenly from his face. "Get a bit sick of it."

The following year, the Play Barn closed, Littlewood decamped to Africa, and the boys came to Platts-Mills with a suggestion: "Why don't you make a proper film, Barney?" Using their ideas, he spent two weeks writing the story of a pair of runaway teenage lovers, who seek refuge with the criminal whose nickname gives the film its title. He cast Walker in the male lead, Anne Gooding, a cashier from the Co-op dairy in Parson's Green, as the heroine, and filmed in locations around Stratford and Greenwich.

"We did have more in common that appearances would suggest," he says. "I was telling a story about the impropriety of telling 15-year-olds what to do, and I was very conscious of that myself, because I'd left school as soon as I legally could, the day after my fifteenth birthday. And at that time the government was busy raising the school leaving age, which I think was a disaster. In those days, as far as I was concerned they could blow all the schools up.

"Our generation thought the world was at our feet," he ventures. "I assumed everything would change. But I very soon gave up producing films. There was nothing I liked about showing the film, nothing I liked about going to festivals. We were offered money to make more, but to me it seemed irrational if we couldn't make them work financially. I didn't want to just get away with it and make another movie." Whatever Barney Platts-Mills does in Morocco, it won't be that.

'Bronco Bullfrog' is available on DVD and video from www.platts-mills.com