Susan Penhaligon and Bruce Robinson in Private Road.
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They were plagued nevertheless by many of the same problems of the Bronco Bullfrog gang: how to realise one’s dreams and make one’s mark in a world that rewards conformity and compromise.
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Made in colour on a slightly larger budget (£26,000), it featured professional actors, including Susan Penhaligon and Bruce Robinson (later the writer and director of the 1987 comedy Withnail and I) as well-to-do sweethearts. Private Road was another acutely observed study of a relationship under unreasonable strain. Early Maya works include St Christopher (1967), Platts-Mills’s documentary about Rudolf Steiner schools for children with disabilities. Inspired by them, he formed with the director James Scott and the cinematographer Adam Barker-Mill his own company, Maya Film Productions, with financial help from Nicholas Gormanston, the premier viscount of Ireland they were soon joined by the producer Andrew St John.
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Later he showed the main characters of his second film, Private Road (1971), going to see Stanley Kubrick’s epic on their first date.Īfter a spell in the cutting rooms at Granada Television, he worked with John and Marlene Fletcher, who had been associated with the Free Cinema movement.
Platts-Mills also assisted the sound editor Winston Ryder, who was busy on the soundtrack to Spartacus (1960). Gilbert employed him as third assistant trainee editor on The Greengage Summer (1961). You want to tell them what to do.”īarney Platts-Mills’ second feature film, Private Road, starred Bruce Robinson, who later made Withnail and I, and Susan Penhaligon His father asked for advice from the director Lewis Gilbert, who told the boy: “You don’t want to be an actor. He was educated at Bryanston school, Dorset, and left at 15 with hopes of becoming an actor. Rereleases in 20 saw its reputation restored.īarney was born in Colchester, Essex, to John Platts-Mills, a barrister who was briefly a Labour MP until his expulsion from the party in 1948 over his socialist sympathies, and Janet (nee Cree), an artist. The master negative was even dumped in a skip, and rescued only by a quick-thinking grader. (Princess Anne later responded to a letter of apology sent by Shepherd, and attended a special screening of Bronco Bullfrog at the ABC cinema in Mile End.) It played at Cannes in 1970 but was largely forgotten thereafter. It was pulled from one central London cinema after only 18 days to make way for a royal premiere, prompting a rowdy protest by the cast and their friends.
The finished film, however, was hamstrung by slapdash distribution. “I could do better with my children on the lawn,” he said. Bronco Bullfrog may have survived almost being killed at birth – it had been “rejected by several who should have known better”, noted Derek Malcolm in this paper, alluding to the director Bryan Forbes, who had expressed an interest in financing the script until he saw Platts-Mills’s short about Littlewood’s workshops. Many predicted a bright future for the film-maker.Īnne Gooding, Del Walker and Sam Shepherd in Bronco Bullfrog. Jay Cocks, the Time magazine critic and future screenwriter, noted that “there is hardly a moment that does not display a vigorous, very real talent”. Alexander Walker in the Evening Standard said: “It sends your heart leaping.” The director Lindsay Anderson called it “a very, very good film indeed, not just promising but a promise fulfilled”. Praise for the picture was near unanimous. There was a script, the director confirmed, but “sometimes the cast used it and sometimes they did not”. “Barney just said, ‘Do it the way you’d do it really,’” recalled Gooding. The visual style could be scrappy, the acting unpolished, but that was part of the charm. In one scene, Del buys a cinema ticket, then opens the fire exit in the auditorium to admit a handful of his pals, only to find a whole queue of expectant freeloaders headed by a cheery pensioner. The grimy, desolate locations show these youngsters to be products of their environment, but a resilient good humour endures in them, and in the film. Platts-Mills balances hope and despair, joy and bareknuckle toughness. The trailer for Bronco Bullfrog, 1969, reissued by the BFI in 2010
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