John Wayne’s London: in search of the locations for cult crime thriller Brannigan

The only British film ever to star John Wayne, the cult 1975 action thriller Brannigan found Duke playing Jim Brannigan, the tough cop making an unusual journey from the mean streets of Chicago to the slightly less mean streets of London.

The British police, led by Commander Swann (Richard Attenborough), have apprehended international criminal Larkin (John Vernon). Brannigan is sent to collect him and bring him home for trial. It isn’t long, however, before the mob bigwig is snatched and held for ransom. Helped by trusty officer Jennifer (Judy Geeson), Brannigan must traipse the streets of the capital as a dangerous conspiracy grows around the wanted man.

Scripted by Christopher Trumbo, son of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, Brannigan came during a brilliant 1970s streak for London-born director Douglas Hickox, following farcical comedy Entertaining Mr Sloane (1970), brutal crime thriller Sitting Target (1972) and camp horror masterpiece Theatre of Blood (1973). But the production came close to coming off the rails: Wayne, who was 67 at time of shooting, struggled through the filming due to heart problems and a recent bout of pneumonia.

Sadly, despite Wayne’s hopes for a Dirty Harry-style rogue-cop hit, the results were a critical and commercial flop at the time, although the film has outlasted the critics and won big-name fans, including Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright. Tarantino screened his own print of the movie at the third Quentin Tarantino Film Festival in Austin, Texas in 1999.

During Brannigan’s London shoot, the production accessed some of the most secretive of the city’s locations, as well as making the most of the various landmarks in an attempt to appeal to American audiences.

As the film is released on BFI Blu-ray, here are five locations as they stand today.

Once the film has moved from the opening gritty streets of Chicago to London, one of the first sites we see is the famed Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane. We see a low view of the hotel’s unchanged entrance with its top-hatted doormen.

Throughout the film, Hickox shoots many locations from unusual and high-up viewpoints, including this shot of the hotel taken from the adjacent building.

One of the other hotel features we see is the historic fountain in the court of its entranceway. This shot looks out directly on to Park Lane. The fountain was changed only recently with the little forecourt now dominated by a sculpture to commemorate Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee in 2022. 

One of the more unusual location choices in the film is its use of private members’ clubs. Such establishments rarely allowed filming inside due to their closed and prestigious nature. Larkin, for example, is ambushed and kidnapped in the Royal Automobile Club on Pall Mall. However, the producers’ biggest coup was gaining permission from the famed Garrick Club in Covent Garden, noted for its creative and artistic membership.

As the film starred Garrick member Richard Attenborough, the club allowed permission for the team to film inside and out. Unsurprisingly, the exterior shots of the club have little changed in the decades gone by, while shots of the inside show portraits of then-present members Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud adorning the walls.

Though largely using London’s more typical landmarks, Hickox does incorporate a handful of interesting, lesser known locations for a few key scenes. For example, Brannigan stays at a flat in Battersea. During his own stay in London, Wayne met Katharine Hepburn for the first time, who was in the city shooting George Cukor’s Love Among the Ruins (1975). It was this meeting that led to the pair eventually making the True Grit sequel Rooster Cogburn (1975) together.

The flat is at 61 to 80 York Mansions on the beautiful Prince of Wales Drive. The row is one of the few on this side of Battersea to have survived the years of intense redevelopment and demolition. 

Eagle-eyed viewers may recognise the architecture from another 1970s British crime film, namely Michael Tuchner’s Villain (1971). Ian McShane’s character in that film also lived in York Mansions, albeit at 81 to 101, next door from Brannigan’s lodgings.

Hickox films the road several times, making the most of its natural elegance and Battersea Park’s adjacent greenery. Little has changed in the intervening years. 

One of the film’s most famous sequences takes place in Leadenhall Market, the ancient covered market in the City of London that has made its way into numerous films, most famously Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001).

Hickox chose Leadenhall Market for its rough and tumble pub, The Lamb Tavern, which is still preserved today. The tavern is the setting for the London equivalent of the kind of barroom brawl that features in so many of Wayne’s westerns.

The Lamb Tavern is still trading today under the same name, though is less rowdy and violent than shown in the film. 

The film’s most distinctive location is undoubtedly Tower Bridge. It features early on in the film but is returned to for the famous (not to say ridiculous) climax to its excellent car chase.

The chase starts in Battersea, and so approaches the bridge from the south, but the geography becomes confused in the sequence’s dramatic cutting. The cars are actually seen heading over the bridge from north to south. In the shot below, we see a view northwards as the cars approach.

The view southwards is now much changed, showing how dramatic some of the modern redevelopment has been since the shoot in 1974. 

After Brannigan has fantastically jumped the borrowed Ford Capri over the raised bridge and into a skip, we see a shot looking up at one of the towers. Notably, this is a late documentation of the bridge with its darkened metalwork, before it was spruced up with a red, white and blue paint job in commemoration of the Silver Jubilee in 1977.

The closing shots of the film also focus on the bridge and the surrounding area. In one shot we see what was once The Tower Hotel. The hotel is simply called The Tower today, but the architecture remains.

The final shot before the credits shows the bridge again, while also providing a view of Timepiece by Wendy Taylor, a public sculpture that was brand new at the time of filming.

IMDb
Reelstreets