London through a director's lens

With ‘Sweeney Todd’, Tim Burton is the latest in a line of foreign directors to offer their impression of London. J B Miller looks back on a long tradition, from Richard Lester’s ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ to Woody Allen’s ‘Match Point’

As the blood soaks the screen in Tim Burton’s violent, gothic ‘Sweeney Todd’, is anyone reminded of the director’s Burbank, Southern California upbringing? Not likely. But Burton is the latest in a long line of foreign directors, many of them American, making quintessential London films.

Take Richard Lester, a Philadelphia-born director who has been in the UK since 1955. He stopped making movies after ‘The Return of the Musketeers’ in 1989, but in 1964 he created the film that helped set the look for swinging sixties London: his ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ showed the Beatles threading through a cab to escape a mass of screaming fans in Paddington Station.

A year after ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, Roman Polanski (born in Paris, raised in Poland) caught South Kensington on the cusp of the youthquake in his low-budget, high-art horror flick ‘Repulsion’ that starred a young Catherine Deneuve. And in 1966 Italian Michelangelo Antonioni barely spoke a word of English when he shot a vividly hip London in ‘Blow-Up’. Loosely adapted from a story by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, the film features David Hemmings’s photographic studio-cum-residence in Holland Park and even includes a poorly attended Yardbirds concert at a club in the West End.

It was the anti-communist blacklist that brought American filmmakers Jules Dassin and Joseph Losey to England in the 1950s. At a time when many native directors were set-bound on the sound stages of Pinewood and Shepperton, Dassin filmed ‘Night and the City’ (1950), one of the signature London films of the post-war era, on the dingy West End streets with a striking dénouement on Chelsea Embankment. And Losey, having embraced his new country, caught a pre-happening Chelsea in ‘The Servant’ (1964), the pubs and shops on the Kings Road not yet overrun by bell-bottomed hipsters.

It took another American, Stanley Donen, to helm the brilliant 1967 Peter Cook/Dudley Moore concoction ‘Bedazzled’ (of the 2000 remake: no comment). It’s difficult to think of a less likely candidate for capturing swinging London; a decade and a half earlier he’d co-directed with Gene Kelly the MGM classic ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. When he moved to England in the late ’50s he started making European films such as ‘Arabesque’ (1966) and ‘Two for the Road’ (1967). He showed a postcard Paris in the ersatz Hitchcockian thriller ‘Charade’ (1963), and we can also blame him for ‘Blame it on Rio’ (1984), but his pop take on ’60s London is a revelation.

That’s not to say that British directors never shot on their own streets, just that it’s particularly interesting when foreign filmmakers from Joseph Losey to Tim Burton offer their own impression of the capital. Look carefully and you can find terrific location work going back at least to the tail end of the rationing era, including the bombed ruins still piled high around St Paul’s in Charles Crichton’s Ealing comedy classic ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’ (1951), and an eerily empty Belgravia in Carol Reed’s ‘The Fallen Idol’ (1948). Still, it’s Reed’s post-war Vienna that he’s most famous for, preserving as if in amber the dark, rubble-strewn city in ‘The Third Man’ (1949). It was a foreign sensibility – this time a British one – that caught Joseph Cotton’s discomfort in the sinister, occupied city, finally sending him on that famous chase after Orson Welles through the city’s sewers.

Of course, there will always be directors associated with their own cities: Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and Woody Allen in New York; Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut in Paris; Federico Fellini in Rome; Wong Kar-Wai in Hong Kong. Leaving their hometowns, these directors haven’t always travelled well. When Allen shot ‘Match Point’ in London (purely for financial reasons, he freely confessed), it had all the misplaced insider knowledge of a promotional video shot for an airline. (His depiction of Paris in ‘Everyone Says I Love You’ is little better.) Bostonians count the ways Scorsese got their city wrong in ‘The Departed’ (which, though set in Boston, was largely shot in New
York anyway).

Then there’s the unique case of a director shooting his hometown somewhere else. For ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999), the Hertfordshire hermit Stanley Kubrick (born in Manhattan) built an odd, dreamlike New York on the soundstages of Pinewood, complete with yellow taxi cabs and blue metal mailboxes. Kubrick didn’t get New York wrong, exactly, but the city he hadn’t visited in decades looked as if it had been pieced together with snapshots provided by a location scout.

And how real was Kubrick’s New York meant to be anyway? Maybe no more so than Julien Temple’s stylised Soho in ‘Absolute Beginners’ (1986), or Derek Jarman’s anachronistic Rome in ‘Caravaggio’, built in a London Docklands warehouse in 1986. Kubrick offered a dystopian London in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1971), made up of pop art interiors and exaggerated council estates (the graffiti looked a bit art directed). Would a Brit have made it look too real?

For ‘Sweeney Todd’, Tim Burton wasn’t trying to create a particularly authentic Victorian London. Instead, he brought a bit of a Burbank soundstage to the mix, though adding his trademark attractive gloom. Perhaps in the future, his view of nineteenth-century London will be as recognisable as the one seen in ‘My Fair Lady’ (1964). That was directed by George Cukor, who, of course, was born in New York.

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