The White Bus

Originally designed to be part of a feature called Red, White and Zero, a planned reunion of three 'Free Cinema' directors. When Karel Reisz' Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment turned into a feature, Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson were joined by Peter Brook, but their three contributions were never released together, and only Anderson's has stood the test of time. Shelagh Delaney's script takes an impassive young girl (Healey) out of her suicidal London office back to her Northern home town, which she views as part of a bizarre bus tour. The film looks forward to Anderson's blurring of the fantastic and the naturalistic in If...., and benefits from the poetic eye of the same Czech cameraman, Miroslav Ondricek. Fitting no conventional genre, the offbeat humour often hits the mark as a non-specific satire on British moribundity.