10 great British films of 1975

Between the Sex Pistols’ first live performance and Margaret Thatcher making history by defeating Edward Heath in the Conservative leadership contest to become the first female leader of a major UK political party, 1975 offered some clear indications of the contending cultural forces shaping British life. 

The UN proclamation of International Women’s Year and the commencement of both the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts were tangible advances owed to second-wave feminism, but a steadily rising unemployment rate was grim news. Football hooliganism was rife; divisions on the topic of European integration were evident at both public and government levels. And it snowed in June.

The debuts of Fawlty Towers and The Good Life at least gave TV viewers some new works of sitcom genius to enjoy. And in cinema some truly brave and original films were made, despite ongoing financial challenges. Indeed, the withdrawal of US funding from UK film production had begun to lead to some fresh, creative partnerships by 1975 – whether it was Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin contributing financing to Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Australian music entrepreneur Robert Stigwood producing Ken Russell’s rock opera extravaganza Tommy. 

The anarchic spirit of those films clearly reflected an aspect of the national mood, as did a radical vision brought to accounts of rural life and English history by certain filmmakers. Others looked to classics of English literature or European theatre for inspiration; still others focused firmly on the contemporary moment, including the experiences of Black Britons, presented with detail, range and honesty for the first time in British cinema.

Director: James Ivory

Madhur Jaffrey’s princess settles James Mason’s Cyril Sahib down in the living room of her Kensington flat, serving tea and preparing some old film footage to watch together. They’re meeting on the birthday of an absent figure: her late father, the Maharaja, to whom Cyril was an English tutor in India. But as the conversation progresses, and the images unfold in front of them, it becomes clear that the pair have different memories of the past and of the man they’ve come to celebrate. 

Filmed in London on a tiny budget in just five days, Merchant Ivory’s 60-minute film anticipates some of the themes of their later work. Incorporating a subtle gay undercurrent, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s intelligent script works as both a social portrait of a changed India viewed from a position of self-imposed exile, and as a dual character study, which is turned into an absorbing dual performance by its two expert actors. 

Director: Stanley Kubrick

The artistic temperaments of William Makepeace Thackeray and Stanley Kubrick may seem rather contrasting ones, but from the former’s 1844 novel, a swiftly-paced picaresque parody of romantic writing, the maverick director fashioned a remarkable film that makes high art out of heritage. 

Ryan O’Neal is counter-intuitively but effectively cast as the rogue wending his way with equal grace through combat zones and high society echelons, ever in pursuit of greater wealth and social advancement. With exquisitely detailed production design by Ken Adam and cinematography by John Alcott that references 18th-century painting, Kubrick creates from the protagonist’s adventures a distinctively wry, stately and mesmerising pageant.

Director: Trevor Nunn

The social advances made for women in the 1970s didn’t obviously translate into British cinema, where the paucity of female-directed features is as glaring as it is shocking. (Jane Arden’s boldly feminist and experimental 1972 film The Other Side of the Underneath was a rare beacon in this regard.) Rich and complex female characters were at least visible on screen, though – even if filmmakers sometimes had to go back to 19th-century novels or plays to find them.

Maggie Smith and Glenda Jackson both triumphed on stage in different productions of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in this decade (with Smith directed by Ingmar Bergman). But only Jackson’s performance was filmed, as Trevor Nunn brought his world-touring Royal Shakespeare Company staging to the screen in a version that retained a charged intensity. Jackson is ideally cast as one of Ibsen’s most challenging protagonists, well-supported by a cast including Timothy West, Peter Eyre and Patrick Stewart, the latter making his big-screen debut.

Director: Lindsay Anderson

Also making the transition from stage to screen, with the benefit of the cast and director of its original 1969 production, was David Storey’s play In Celebration, produced for the admirable American Film Theatre series. 

Reuniting Storey with director Lindsay Anderson over a decade after their success with This Sporting Life (1963), the drama’s focus is a family reunion: the return of three sons to the mining town of their birth to celebrate their parents’ 40th wedding anniversary. Anderson opts for an unfussy approach that spotlights the performances, which create an exceptionally convincing family dynamic. As brothers who’ve abandoned their father’s profession to pursue their own goals with mixed success, Alan Bates, Brian Cox and James Bolam are a riveting trio. 

Directors: Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam

Transfers of TV comedy series to film were a staple of 1970s British cinema, and often a notably dismal one. Trust the ever-assured Python boys to pull it off, however, affixing the absurdism of the Flying Circus to a wisp of quest narrative plot. With Terrys Jones and Gilliam on directing duties and them, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin and Eric Idle dexterously multi-roling, this parody of Arthurian legend (and much else besides) wasn’t instantly accepted as a comedy classic-in-the-making but has become increasingly beloved through the decades. It would later inspire Idle’s hit 2005 musical Spamalot. 

Encompassing animated interludes, random swashbuckling, a particularly deadly rabbit, Knights Who Say ‘Ni!’, ‘classic British acting’ from Chapman, highly creative insults from the French, and an intermission (shorter than The Brutalist’s), the epic scattershot silliness is sustained from the Palin-penned opening ‘Scandavian’ subtitles to the (literally) arresting end. 

Director: Horace Ové

Sometimes listed as a 1976 film, Pressure in fact premiered at the 1975 London Film Festival but notoriously had its release delayed – possibly due to concerns over its content. West London is the setting for Ové’s great debut feature, co-written with Sam Selvon, which documents the political awakening of the protagonist, Herbert Norville’s Tony. The teenage son of Trinidadian immigrants, Tony finds himself frustrated by limited prospects and positioned between his parents’ integrationist conformity and his brother’s immersion in Black Power.

As the first feature made by a Black director in Britain, one that presents a family drama of intergenerational tensions in the context of a wider social critique, Pressure’s place in film history should always have been assured. Happily, the film’s recent restoration and re-release have brought it to a new generation, cementing its reputation as a classic that indelibly influenced and emboldened the burgeoning Black British cinema. 

Director: David Gladwell

The visionary turn of 1970s rural cinema, evident from Alan Clarke’s Penda’s Fen (1974) to Peter Hall’s Akenfield (1974), reached another of its odder apexes with Gladwell’s idiosyncratic film, shaped to the rhythms of an elderly man’s memories and fantasies. An accomplished editor for the likes of Lindsay Anderson, Gladwell here creates a portrait of a Suffolk village that, like Hall’s film, moves fluidly and associatively through time periods – although with more surprising and outré imagery in this case. 

While the ‘folk horror’ label often attached to the film is not a perfect fit, Requiem for a Village is very far from a lulling nostalgic reverie: a montage of sexual violence is every bit as disturbing as it intends to be, as the film powerfully evokes tensions and confrontations between tradition and modernity. 

Director: Jim Sharman

From modest Royal Court debut to global cult phenomenon… Jim Sharman’s film does full cinematic justice to Richard O’Brien’s glorious musical, with its mix of spoof horror, sci-fi and general midnight-movie-derived excess. As the all-American innocents seeking shelter on a stormy night at the old dark house occupied by Dr Frank-N-Furter and his motley crew of friends, flunkies and freaky experiments, Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick undergo torments, seductions and liberations, all set to a score that mixes rock, gospel, glam, pop and torch song into its own hybrid creation.

With Tim Curry in scintillating form as the rapacious – and not always as sweet as he claims – “transvestite”, Rocky Horror hasn’t aged a bit and remains a subversive queer delight 50 years after its premiere. “Give yourself over to absolute pleasure,” advises Dr Frank. It’s the only (in)decent thing to do when watching this film. 

Director: Ken Russell

Never a slouch, Ken Russell had a particularly productive 1970s, with two films released in 1975 alone. While Lisztomania undoubtedly has its splendours, the better sustained work of the two is Tommy, adapted from The Who’s rock opera song cycle. Despite a stated aversion to rock, Russell turned the material into a dazzling audiovisual spectacle boasting some sequences to make even Rocky Horror look tame. 

Tracing the coming-of-age of its hero from his VE Day birth to traumatised youth, from “pinball wizard” to religious guru, Tommy is also a fantasia on post-war Britain and its increasing commercialisation. In that respect it’s as astute as it is cartoonish, enhanced by startling design flourishes and indelible cameos (take a bow, Tina Turner’s Acid Queen), plus an extraordinary Ann-Margret, as Tommy’s mother, getting up to all kinds of things she never got to do on screen with Elvis. Buoyed by The Who’s exciting music, Russell’s brio carries the viewer breathlessly along to an ecstatic finale. 

Directors: Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo 

With Winstanley, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo bring a vivid authenticity to a vital, exceedingly rich yet underdramatised period of English history. As an example of collective farming on what was formerly common land, the settlement formed on St George’s Hill in Surrey by Gerrard Winstanley and his group of Diggers in 1649 has historical but also symbolic significance that resonated powerfully with the moment of the film’s making, and with counterculture ideals.

Winstanley adapts David Caute’s 1961 novel Comrade Jacob in a way that didn’t entirely please the author, who objected to the film’s shortchanging of the protagonist’s contradictions and religious fervour. But with its mix of improvised elements and narrated sections drawing on Winstanley’s writings, plus superb black-and-white photography (by Ernest Vincze), Brownlow and Mollo’s film remains a deeply stirring evocation of the English past.