Capital Celluloid 2021 — Day 166: Fri Oct 29

Bitter Harvest (Scott, 1963): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6pm


This 35mm presentation is part of director Edgar Wright’s ‘London after Dark’ season (full details here) and is also being shown on November 9th (full information here).

Edgar Wright introduction: This film takes the centrepiece of Patrick Hamilton’s masterly London trilogy of novels, 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, updates it to the early 60s and then rattles through the turbulent events in a somewhat tidy 90 minutes. This simplification of the novel for maximum melodrama steers the film towards luridness, but it still has some queasily effective moments as it swan-dives into the stylings and attitudes of the period.

Here (and above) is the opening.

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