Red Joan

Over the years we have been running any film starring Judi Dench has always been popular, and so it proved with Red Joan. The reviews had not been brilliant but it was an enjoyable film with some excellent performances, and it was good to see a story about Cambridge spies that did not overtly refer to Burgess and Maclean.

Red Joan

UK 2018          101 minutes

Director:          Trevor Nunn

Starring:            Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Stephen Campbell-Moore and Tom Hughes

“This 40s period piece tootles picturesquely along like a cold war, heterosexual version of The Imitation Game, the biopic of wartime codebreaker Alan Turing. There is the same prestige Britpic furniture: clipped vowels, kindly officer-class boffins, sexy smoulderers, brilliant women patronised by pipe-smoking, pint-quaffing chaps, illicit (straight) relationships in cramped rooms with a sixpence for the meter.”

Peter Bradshaw

The peaceful retirement of Joan Stanley (Judi Dench) is disrupted when she is taken into custody after MI5 discover that in the past she provided intelligence to the KGB. In 1938 a young Joan Stanley (Sophie Cookson) is studying physics at Cambridge where she falls for a young communist called Leo Galich (Tom Hughes). After graduating Joan is offered a job at a weapons research facility and as the nuclear arms race accelerates she has to decide what she would do to secure peace in the world.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Jennie Rooney which was inspired by the life of Melita Norwood, a member of the Woolwich Spy Ring, who supplied nuclear secrets to the USSR while working for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association and thus helped the Soviet development of nuclear weapon technology. In reality Norwood spent a year studying Latin and Logic at the University College of Southampton rather than physics at Cambridge, but the change makes a notional link with the Cambridge Spy Ring that included Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt.

Trevor Nunn has had a long career in the theatre where he has served as Artistic Director of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre as well as directing a series of globally successful musicals such as Cats and Les Miserables. He has also worked in television and to a lesser extent in cinema, although most of his work for television has been to produce screen versions of his own successful stage productions. For the cinema prior to Red Joan he has directed only three films in over more than 40 years: Hedda (1975) with Glenda Jackson as Hedda Gabler; Lady Jane (1986) which gave an early starring role to Helena Bonham Carter as Lady Jane Grey; and Twelfth Night (1996) which starred Imogen Stubbs, Nunn’s then wife, and Helena Bonham Carter in leading roles.

Here's the trailer:

Fisherman's Friends

We started our current season last September but in the light of the Coronavirus Pandemic we decided to can what remains of our programme. I write notes for every film we screen and some people even read them. For the sake of completeness I'll post them all over the next few weeks as I currently have no plans to go anywhere.

I'd not seen this film at the cinema, but it was quite fun: certainly a good way to bring an audience back to our film club after the summer break.

Fisherman’s Friends

UK 2019          112 minutes

Director:          Chris Foggin

Starring:            James Purefoy, Daniel Mays, Noel Clarke and Tuppence Middleton

“Fisherman's Friends is a formulaic but thoroughly amiable and upbeat British comedy with a flavour of Ealing Studios and The Full Monty about it. The plot which the screenwriters have cooked up seems almost an afterthought. The singing fishermen came first. The Fisherman’s Friends really were signed by a major record label, had a top 10 hit, and turned into a full-blown media sensation. The film takes considerable liberties with their story, but fans of extra mature Cornish cheddar won’t be complaining.”

Geoffrey McNab

While visiting a Cornish village on a stag weekend Danny (Daniel Mays) a London music executive is tricked buy his boss (Noel Clarke) into trying to sign a group of local fishermen who sign sea shanties. As he struggles to gain the respect and enthusiasm of the group he is drawn deeper into their traditional way of life and this makes him re-evaluate his own integrity and what success actually means.

The film declares that it is “based on a true story”, but the reality is that Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft, the writers and producers of the film, saw the group Fisherman’s Friends performing on TV, optioned their life rights and then created their own story. The real life story of the group is more mundane: radio presenter Johnnie Walker bought two of the group’s homemade CDs while on holiday in Cornwall and then his manager travelled to Port Isaac to meet them and then negotiated a recording contract worth £1 million for them. A very different view of the contemporary Cornish fishing industry can be seen in Mark Jenkin’s Bait (2019), which Peter Bradshaw described as “an episode of EastEnders directed by F W Murnau” and which Mark Kermode has hailed as one of the defining British films of the decade.

Nick Moorcroft has written a number of successful British comedy films including St Trinian’s (2007) and St Trinian’s: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold (2009,) and more recently the romantic comedy Finding Your Feet (2017). Chris Foggin has worked on a films as diverse as My Week with Marilyn (2011), The Iron Lady (2011) and Effie Grey (2014) as an Assistant Director as well as performing a similar role in a number of high profile television programmes, but this is his first feature film as director.

Here's a link to the trailer: