1967’s
Red, White and Zero is the Bermuda Triangle of portmanteau films. Intended as a high concept trilogy of Shelagh Delaney stories to be directed by Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, Reisz jumped ship in pre-production to be replaced by Peter Brook while only Anderson stuck to the original pitch with a Delaney-scripted entry in what was reworked as three separate stories with no connecting theme. Short of a unifying thread it’s hard to see why Woodfall went ahead with it, and United Artists certainly couldn’t figure out what to do with the end result. Eventually its separate parts got separated and shelved aside from the briefest escapes: the first got one TV screening many years later, the third played a few days as a supporting 'feature' to
The Graduate before being laughed off the screen and only the second got even minimal exposure a couple of years after it was shot. Although the film was certified by the BBFC in 1968 it wasn’t until 50 years later it emerged in its (more or less) original form with a screening at the National Film Theatre before a Bluray release
The first episode, Peter Brook’s
Ride of the Valkyrie, is easily the worst, a dialogue-free black and white comedy that sees Zero Mostel’s opera singer try to make it from Heathrow airport to Covent Garden in time for a performance, changing in Frank Thornton’s cab and navigating the underground in full costume with the aid of Julia Foster. The original cut was wildly overlong before Anderson was brought in to cut it down to size, but for all the overstated energy (at times it appears to have been shot slightly faster at around 22 frames per second while the actors were instructed to move a little slower to create a weird sense of time) there’s not a laugh in it, though it does offer one bit of synergy when Foster sits down next to a poster for Alfie, in which she was one of Michael Caine’s conquests.
The second, Lindsay Anderson’s
The White Bus, is easily the best, with Patricia Healey, looking like a cross between Delaney herself and Beryl Bainbridge, a perfect calm eye of the storm of social unease as her vaguely suicidal typist takes a train full of drunken xenophobic football supporters (John Savident among them) back to Manchester where she takes a sightseeing bus on a whim. Naturally the bus contains a cross-section of society, from African and Japanese tourists to Arthur Lowe’s patronising mayor, all ushered along by a tour guide reading her script by rote. Along the way Stephen Moore’s passer-by declares his love, or more accurately the somewhat limited principled defiance of the dictates of social barriers that frown at romantic social mobility while rushing for a train, war games are staged, libraries admonished for their filthy books and liberties attempted to be taken, played with a straight face for every absurdity. It’s not exactly profound, but as a mood piece caught between reality (or the 60s kitchen Sink Realism version of it) and matter of fact moments of surreal imagination it casts its own kind of spell, Miroslav Ondricek’s cinematography hinting at the style Anderson would adopt in
If… with its brief moments of seemingly random full colour amid the predominant monochrome. It also makes an interesting visual comparison with Albert Finney’s Shelagh Delaney-scripted
Charlie Bubbles, which shot around the same time (and uses the same composer, Misha Donat) before being itself shelved for a couple of years and almost replicates a few shots on the main character’s return to his home town. And if you don’t blink, you can spot Anthony Hopkins in a brief shot making his big screen debut singing a Bertolt Brecht song.
The last and most infamous, Tony Richardson’s
Red and Blue, briefly escaped and played as the supporting feature to
The Graduate at the London Pavilion before being unceremoniously pulled, according to editor Kevin Brownlow, due to virulent audience derision and buried in an unmarked grave for the next 51 years. Seen today there’s only one truly awful scene, with Vanessa Redgrave singing in millionaire Douglas Fairbanks Jr’s swimming pool about how she and her twin sister made the men go dango dango (almost certainly the key moment the audience made their displeasure so very vocal), but it’s a curious nothing of an episode.
Heavily influenced by the nouvelle vague in general and Jacques Demy in particular, it’s little more than a series of Cyrus Bassiak songs Redgrave and Richardson liked strung together by a gossamer thin not-even-a-plot as an unsuccessful singer reflects on and occasionally glamorises her messy love life. Redgrave can deliver the songs on the level of a jobbing nightclub singer but she can’t make them mean anything emotionally nor can she make us care about a character who barely seems to exist as anything other than a conduit for the lyrics, whose charm doesn’t make the trip from French to Julian More’s English translation. (They didn’t stint on the music side, with Truffaut and Godard collaborator Antoine Duhamel arranging the songs and the James Bond theme’s Monty Norman acting as music consultant.) It’s clearly where most of the budget went, with a cast including William Sylvester (who comes off best despite decidedly not being the kind of actor who looks good in Y-fronts), Gary Lockwood, a debuting Michael York and John Bird and as an exercise in style it’s impressive, with Assheton Gorton’s excellent production design - the number may be awful but that swimming pool set is a gem - and Billy Williams’ superlative colour cinematography worthy of a better film, but that just makes it a good looking corpse.
Final score: two zeros and an interesting bus ride.
The 1.33:1 transfer is strong but the film isn’t quite restored to its originally intended version: though Valkyrie retains what would have been the original opening titles, Red and White sports the new credits that were made for its brief run as supporting short. As with many a disappointing film, the extras ride to the rescue, with a 48-minute documentary shot during the making of The White Bus, new interviews with Billy Williams and Kevin Brownlow (who edited Richardson and Anderson’s entries and provided behind the scenes footage for the latter, narrated here by Williams), an introduction-cum-stills gallery by Anderson to a 1968 screening of his film, a 1969 British cartoon No Arks narrated by Vanessa Redgrave, an audio commentary by Adrian Martin that often feels a little thin on background detail, and booklet.
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