British Films

On British telly in half an hour.

The US subtitles are indeed a thing:

Sparrows Can’t Sing attempts to represent the diversity of characters and cultures that were prevalent in the East End during the early 1960s, including those typically found in the local pub, as well as local tarts, Jewish tradesmen and spivs. Consequently the dialogue became a mix of rhyming slang, London Yiddish and thieves cant. It is no surprise that it became the first English language film to be released in the US with subtitles.

Also on the Internet Archive.

A24 and Alex Garland hit a home run with Civil War earlier this year. The film had pretty good reviews but did exceptionally well at the box office. There was doing well and then there were the numbers that this movie managed to pull in. If it was one of the bigger studios, they would have looked at that $124 million worldwide and probably fired someone, but for A24, that is a win. So, it's not surprising to hear that Garland and A24 are teaming up for another war-based project. This one is just called Warfare and was written and directed by Garland and Ray Mendoza, an Iraq war veteran. Whenever a movie based on modern-day warfare comes out, you always see veterans reacting to the film and talking about what aspects of the film are accurate and what aspects aren't. This time, the team for this film appears to be trying to stop that before the film even comes out by having a veteran behind the camera. It's one thing to have someone on set as a consultant; it's another to have them behind the camera and helping direct a scene. The first trailer and poster were released earlier this month, and the film will be released sometime next year, maybe in April, if they want to try and make that Civil War lighting strike twice.

Trailer

In the hit 1990 film The Krays, the East End gangsters were portrayed as “identical twins who rose from poverty to power”, “from obscurity to fame” and “from the back streets to the attention of the world”. They were “special” boys, the film claimed, who loved their mother.

But the producer now says he regrets glamorising them and is making another film that will portray the mobsters as they really were.

Ray Burdis said he wants to put the record straight: “They weren’t folk heroes. They were just a pair of cowardly psychopathic bullies, who terrorised the East End of London in the 1960s.”

He said that films such as The Godfather, the Marlon Brando classic about the mafia, had made it fashionable to idolise gangsters.

The Krays, which starred brothers Gary and Martin Kemp in critically acclaimed performances, was a huge box-office success, taking more than £100m globally.

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The new film, which he is writing and directing, is titled Last Kings of London. It will be much darker, depicting swinging 1960s London, “where corruption plagued the police force and crime families ruled the streets”, he said.