|
Barney Platts-Mills' debut feature stars an entirely non-professional cast of
local teenagers from Stratford, East London.
The film grew out of a documentary, Everybody's An Actor Shakespeare Said
(1968) made by Platts-Mills about the 'Playbarn' project run by veteran British
theatre figure Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal in Stratford. The project
aimed to divert local youths from loitering and petty crime and into creatively
channelling their energy and imagination through acting and improvisation.
Inspired by Littlewood, Platts-Mills encouraged the youths to come up with a
story based on events taken from their own lives. These were used as the basis
for Bronco Bullfrog. The young cast give the film an air of authenticity and
their sometimes awkward, hesitant performances reflect adolescence in a
non-contrived way.
The film treats its characters warmly and emphasises that their chosen
courses of action - petty crime, delinquency, and in Del's case, elopement with
Irene (which, since Irene was 15, would make Del guilty of abduction) - are
determined by the limited choices they have.
The look of the film is reminiscent of the cinema verité/Free Cinema style
which had ushered in the 1960s, but any sense of optimism suggested by such
films is dashed. The mood of Bronco Bullfrog, shot in black and white against a
backdrop of East End bombsites and the new brutalism of urban high-rise flats,
closes the decade on a pessimistic note of limited horizons for its
working-class protagonists.
As evidence that not all of London had been swinging in the 1960s, Bronco
Bullfrog foreshadowed the 'no future' ethos which characterised the Punk
movement of the mid-to-late-1970s. The film also anticipated the treatment of
disaffected youth which became prevalent in British television dramas such as
Mike Leigh's Meantime (Channel 4, tx. 1/12/1983).
Ian O'Sullivan *This film is available on BFI DVD and Blu-ray.
| 
1. The break-in (1:04)
Production stills
