National Heroes: The British Film Industry in the Seventies and Eighties Book

Following on from Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties, Alexander Walker here focuses on British social change and mass entertainment. From the "hangover years" of the early Seventies to the "renaissance era" of the mid-Eighties, he reveals the multiplicity of human motives and talents underpinning the push for profit and power. Walker looks at the violent cinema of Get Carter and The Long Good Friday; the taxation that drove directors, producers, and actors out of Britain; and the venture of "British Film Year." In tracing the story, Walker also offers astute critical assessments of British talents, including Ken Russell, Derek Jarman, John Hurt, and Monty Python.

For four decades, Alexander Walker was Britain's leading film critic and historian, named Critic of the Year three times in the British Press Awards. This is the second volume in his classic trilogy, A History of the Modern British Film Industry, in which he gives us an eloquent, witty, thoroughly uncompromising history of the modern British film industry.

Library Journal

The best kind of criticism examines the work in question as well as the world in which it came to exist, and these two books, originally published in England, manage that. Until his death in 2003, Walker was the film critic for London's Evening Standard for 43 years. He was also a passionate admirer and historian of British cinema who wrote as much about the industry as he did about individual films and personalities. Originally published in 1974, Hollywood England is a comprehensive and fascinating look at not only the dynamic minds of British filmmaking in the 1960s-e.g., Ken Russell and John Schlesinger-but also Hollywood's pervasive effects. The always complex machinations of filmmaking in Britain were compounded in the Sixties by the cultural and financial lens of American influence. National Heroes, first published in 1985, focuses on the power brokers of British film. American money had disappeared, and the Swinging Sixties gave way to the violent realism of the Seventies, then a return to classic form in the mid-Eighties with Chariots of Fire. Walker reveals the struggles of producers Lew Grade and David Puttnam throughout this transition and the intriguing parallel between Britain's search for a national character and the films that helped or hindered that effort. Walker's work is especially engaging because he did not simply critique film-he uncovered motives, histories, and personalities of filmmakers while placing them squarely in societal context. There are few, if any, books that explore the industry in all its facets with the breadth and passion of these two exceptional studies of British filmmaking in its most dynamic period. Highly recommended for large public and academic libraries.-Peter Thornell, Hingham P.L., MA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.