But like High Noon, Foreman was writing on a number of levels, says Matthew Sweet:
Essentially it’s an antiwar picture. It has all the explosions, it has all those action sequences, but when the cast discovers that the munitions they are going to use to blow up the super-guns have been sabotaged they question the whole point of the mission and the film turns into a kind of play about the rights and wrongs of war.
Winston Churchill didn’t notice the subtle underlying message. He saw the film and loved it enough to request a meeting with Foreman. The main topic of conversation? How to turn Winston’s early life into an action movie. It would certainly be an exciting film but Foreman had a concern, says his son John.
He said to Churchill, ‘You know I’ve had these political problems back in America, which is why I came here?’ and Churchill sort of basically said, ‘Oh my dear boy, don’t worry about that, I don’t care what a man believed when he was a boy, all I care about is if can he do the job.’
Churchill expected to see the finished film in a matter of months, as Carl Foreman related in a 1970s BBC documentary:
So he said, ‘You’ll have it finished in two or three months, I suppose’ and I said, ‘No, sir, two or three years would be more like it.’ ‘Nonsense!’ he said. ‘When we decided on opening a second front in Normandy it didn’t take us that long.’ I said, ‘Yes, you had more money.’
The film Young Winston didn’t come out until 1972 – six years after Churchill’s death – but Foreman was proud of it, calling it his love letter to England.
As the blacklist faded into insignificance, Foreman returned to work in America in 1975. Out with his kids he had a chance encounter with a former friend and fierce critic, remembers John. ‘My father took my sister and I, walked us over to his table and John Wayne stood up, he was an enormous man, and they shook hands. It was weird… but it was a sign that things really were over.’ Foreman was back where he felt he truly belonged. But, says Matthew Sweet, the British, especially the film business, benefitted hugely from his exile. ‘I think that we should be proud that he worked here because if he had stayed in America he would have been condemned to silence.’
Carl Foreman died in Hollywood in 1984 aged 69 – a unique American who made some remarkably British films.
BRITAIN IN A SPIN
It had next to no budget, took six weeks to shoot on cheap 16 mm film and its controversial plot destined it to a graveyard slot on Channel 4. But when the TV play My Beautiful Laundrette was shown at the 1985 Edinburgh TV festival, the reaction to it was so rapturous that it was transferred to 35 mm and shown in cinemas. Now it was a proper film, and the next thing the cast and crew knew, it had received a nomination for an Oscar – Best Original Screenplay.
Set in the early 1980s and in a rundown corner of London, Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke) is a young British Pakistani in thrall to the Thatcherite dream of making money and being judged on your merits, not your background. He persuades his wheeler-dealer uncle (Sayeed Jaffrey) to hand over the keys to a rundown launderette. Omar sees a bright future in soap suds and plans to turn the mundane task of doing a wash and spin into a Las Vegas-like experience.
But as his launderette plans get spinning, his own dirty linen is about to be publicly aired. Omar’s gay, from an ultra-conservative Muslim background and his wedding is being arranged. He’s attacked by a racist gang, the leader of whom is his former lover, Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis). It’s a little awkward, but eventually the boys resume their relationship and realise the dream of the über-laundromat together, but racism, Omar’s Muslim heritage and his impending arranged marriage all threaten to compromise their success. Will it all come out in the wash?
Written by Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette is a bittersweet and very funny observation of life in the entrepreneur economy of the 1980s. The story was partially autobiographical, Omar’s dilemma being familiar to many first-generation British born Muslims who found it difficult – and dangerous – to balance their Western aspirations with what their immigrant parents expected of them. Gordon Warnecke, who played Omar, explains,
I was fresh out of drama school and this was my first film. It tackled all the stereotypes of the time with real grit and humour, something I was really interested in doing, so this was a project I just had to be involved in. Thatcherite economics were key to Laundrette, and they were personal to me. We were part of the ‘do it yourself’ generation’, surrounded by the spirit of free enterprise. But the film asks how far you can go before you find yourself torn between two cultures.
That Omar is gay – and largely unapologetically so, in private at least – caused consternation among the Asian Muslim community worldwide, for whom the issue of homosexuality is, by and large, taboo.
Director Stephen Frears was hooked immediately by what the film had to say about Britain in the 1980s.
I read the script and just had to meet Hanif Kureishi. His mother was White British and his father was from Pakistan, so he lived and observed both cultures simultaneously. I mean, I was just white and middle class, so learning from him about that life was really eye-opening. I thought the critique of Mrs Thatcher was really the most important thing, I didn’t notice that there were gay themes that were going to echo around the world.
But My Beautiful Laundrette doesn’t preach, doesn’t try to ‘tick boxes’ and has a magic ‘common touch’, which appealed to a wide audience. And Omar is constantly faced with the dilemma of whether he can eat the cake he has.
Souad Faress played Cherry, the manipulative Uncle Salim’s wife, who questions where Omar’s true identity lies. In the film she cries, ‘I’m sick of hearing about these in-betweens, people should make up their mind about where they are!’ Looking back, Souad says:
I loved the script. Cherry’s view is, ‘Right, you have to side with us or side with them.’ There’s degrees of racism on both sides, but it made people at least look at the issues how they really are. One thing that seemed to bewilder people was that the immigrant family, the Pakistani family, were so aspirational. They were a wealthy middle class family, but people just didn’t equate immigrants with success, yet it has been proven over and over and over that in Britain’s social history immigrants are very aspirational.
Powders – the name of the Launderette in the film – was on Wilcox Road in Vauxhall, south London. Today it’s a Portuguese restaurant.
CUSHING THE BLOW – WHEN DR WHO BOMBED WITH THE FANS
In 1965, Doctor Who hit the big screen in eye-popping widescreen and retina-burning Technicolor, with Peter Cushing in the titular role. Dr. Who and the Daleks followed very closely the plot of ‘The Daleks’, the first, (black-and-white) encounter between the TV Doctor, played by William Hartnell, and the psychopathic pepperpots.
A sequel, Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150AD, landed on screen less than a year later. Cushing again starred as Dr Who in the story that was, also again, a remake of a Doctor Who TV serial originally starring Hartnell. In both films, Cushing travels through time and space with three companions: his granddaughters, played by Roberta Tovey and Jill Curzon (the 1961 Women’s Clay Pigeon shooting world champion, no less), and a companion who has stumbled on the Tardis by mistake. In the first film, this was Roy Castle; in the second, it was Bernard Cribbins, who would later play a significant role in the rebooted TV show during David Tennant’s tenure.
The films were rushed out to cash in on the craze for all things Dalek that had swept the nation since their TV debut.
