MovieChat Forums > Rillington Place (2016) Discussion > Beatles' pre adolescent photos fascinate...

Beatles' pre adolescent photos fascinated this 60+yo U S guy.


The immediate years after WWII in GB kinda fascinate me. Ugly, poverty, rationing; won the war for a very humble peace. I remember the film from repertory 70s on a double bill with Seance on a Wet Afternoon. Would later realize Richard Attenbourough was all over Brit Films of this era.

So for me this is powerful, evocative stuff. Seems like brave, true, filmmaking that hasn't much hope for popular success. Unrelenting in its drab, depressing portrayal of post war London. Not as tough as slave or holocaust films but a grimness one doesn't want to revisit. I can almost hear Sweeny Todd in the background.

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Lol.

London film noir. The 1950s in monochrome. 

I was born in the fifties. Too late for the era depicted. I'm sure it wasn't as bad as all that, but equally sure that life was tough. Bombed homes, smog, rationing, slums before the major clearances to make way for council estates (which, in turn, became slums).

My own memories of 50's Brighton are in technicolour, but I like the way this production has used muted tones. Very effective.





If there aren't any skeletons in a man's closet, there's probably a Bertha in his attic.

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I was born in the 50s too, so too late for this period, but my parents got married in 1945 and got the tenancy of a hill farm in north Wales - no mechanisation in those days, their wedding presents included a horse from my paternal grandfather and four cows from my maternal grandfather, they didn't even have electricity or running water until the mid-1950s a few years before I was born. It was a different era - my parents' second baby died at a day old in 1947, just before the NHS was created. They got their first (black-and-white) TV about six months before I was born in 1958; out of curiosity I did a bit of research a few years ago and discovered that it would have cost 81 guineas then, or over £1700 in todays' purchasing power parity. Things were changing quickly though, they had a tractor and had got rid of the horse by the time I was born, and I can just about remember a threshing machine being brought into the farmyard for a harvest in the early 1960s just before everyone switched to combine harvesters. The 60s were a happy time in my memory, with sunny summers and real snow in the winters!

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I know the feeling, I was born in 1969 and find late 40s to early 60s footage of London in particular fascinating. I'm a Brit by the way. There is that grimness and ugliness but you get a sense that people were bloody happy there wasn't a war going on though, a hint of optimism.

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