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NO
SURRENDER
DVD region 2. Second Sight.
 As
we've discuused before, The 1980s
were a grim time for British cinema, with the collapse of the
commercial industry leading to a world where all we had were turgid
Merchant-Ivory costume dramas, arthouse fare from Derek Jarman
and Peter Greenaway - but mostly and lots and lots of ferociously
earnest productions from broadcasters like Film 4 that all followed
the same template, be they drama or comedy, offering up left wing
polemics reminding people how bad it was to live in Thatcher’s
Britain, and having all the production values of a TV play –
which is effectively what most of them should have been. Determinedly
parochial and desperately worthy, truly awful stuff like Letter
to Brezhnev, My Beautiful Launderette
and British cinema’s absolute nadir, Billy the Kid
and the Green Baize Vampire delighted the sort of critics
who felt that ‘commercial’ was a dirty word, and found
small but vocal middle class metropolitan audiences, but they
were each a stab in the heart of British cinema. It’s remarkable
that it ever recovered.
In the middle of all this came No Surrender,
which – on the face of it – was very much a part of
this depressing movement. Set in Liverpool, from the writer (and
stars) of bleak TV hit The Boys from the Blackstuff,
it didn’t promise much. Yet surprisingly, the film avoided
the pitfalls of its contemporaries, instead offering up a satire
on religious bigotry and gangland crime that still holds up very
well today.
Michael Angelis plays the new manager of the astonishingly grim
looking nightclub The Charleston (it resembles the mutant offspring
of an industrial factory and a nuclear bunker, located in the
middle of nowhere), who starts work on New Years Eve to find his
gangster boss torturing the former manager in a back room, and
then has to cope with the departing manager’s final acts
of defiance – an unscheduled fancy dress party with a cruise
as first prize, a godawful band, a lousy comedian and incompetent
magician, all booked to entertain the two coach parties expected
that evening. The fact that the two parties are a hardline protestant
Orange Lodge and an equally fanatical Catholic club – both
spoiling for a fight and continually antagonising each other throughout
the evening - is just the icing on the cake. Add to this an Irish
loyalist terrorist hiding out at the club and a blind boxer with
a grudge to settle, and things are going to get very uncomfortable
for Angelis, bouncer Bernard Hill and waitress-cum-singer Joanne
Whalley.
 No
Surrender is the blackest of comedies – from the
grim, rundown Liverpool locations and the brutality of the violence
to the murderous threats from the terrorist, it could easily be
a thoroughly depressing movie. But writer Alan Bleasdale (who,
in TV style, gets his name on screen before anyone else) mixes
the darkness with a lot of humour, managing to stop short of ever
going over the top with the absurdity. Angelis’ laconic
style is perfect for the film, and the dialogue sparkles with
sharp one-liners (and a lot of swearing!). The result is a film
that is sharply biting, but also full of laugh-out-loud moments.
It’s probable that on original release, No Surrender
suffered from what people thought it would be. Given
a quarter of a century’s distance, it now feels remarkably
fresh, and deserves to be given another chance.
The DVD comes complete with a featurette in which director Peter
Smith and producer Mamoun Hassan discuss the making of the film
and the difficulties of film production in Britain at the time.
DAVID
FLINT
BUY
IT NOW (UK)
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