Pauline Munro – MRQE

The Committee

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

The Committee, starring Paul Jones of Manfred Mann fame, is a unique document of Britain in the 1960s. After a very successful run in Londons West End in 1968, viewings of this controversial movie have been few and far between. Stunning black and white camera work by Ian Wilson brings to life this chilling fable by Max Steuer, a lecturer (now Reader Emeritus) at the London School of Economics. Avoiding easy answers, The Committee uses a surreal murder to explore the tension and conflict between bureaucracy on one side, and individual freedom on the other. Many films, such as Total Recall, Fahrenheit 451 and Camus The Stranger, see the state as ignorant and repressive, and pass over the inevitable weaknesses lying deep in individuals. Drawing on the ideas of R.D. Laing, a psychologically hip state faces an all too human protagonist.

Tell Me Lies

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Adapted and directed by Peter Brook from the Royal Shakespeare Companys production-in-progress US, this long-unseen agitprop drama-doc shot in London in 1967 and released only briefly in the UK and New York at the height of the Vietnam War remains both thought-provoking and disturbing. A theatrical and cinematic social comment on US intervention in Vietnam, Brooks film also reveals a 1960s London where art, theatre and political protest actively collude and where a young Glenda Jackson and RSC icons such as Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Scofield feature prominently on the front line. Multi-layered scenarios staged by Brook combine with newsreel footage, demonstrations, satirical songs and skits to illustrate the intensity of anti-war opinion within Londons artistic and intellectual community.

Strangler’s Web

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

What appears to be a cut-and-dried case of murder of an aging one time showgirl on Hampstead Heath by her lover is complicated by several factors, including a far more respectable paramour, and her insistence that a great inheritance was due her that nobody can verify.