Hailed as Britain's first black feature film, Pressure is a hard-hitting, honest document of the plight of disenchanted British-born black youths. Set in 1970s London, it tells the story of Tony, a bright school-leaver, son of West Indian immigrants, who finds himself torn between his parents' church-going conformity and his brother's Black Power militancy.
Carol Reed, fresh off the success of Odd Man Out (1947) and The Third Man (1949), directs this crime thriller with James Mason and Claire Bloom in the lead roles. In post-war Berlin, Ivo Kern (Mason) is a man with a criminal past who participates in the accidental kidnapping of British citizen Su...
Jack Clayton’s 1959 romantic drama tells the story of Joe (Laurence Harvey), a young and ambitious man who has just moved to Yorkshire to work for the Borough Treasurer’s Department. He instead becomes romantically involved with Alice (Simone Signoret in an Oscar-winning performance), and what en...
This lively Free Cinema short captures a night out at the Wood Green Jazz Club, where teenagers jive to trad jazz. Funded by the BFI Experimental Film Fund, it was filmed over the course of nine Saturdays by Karel Reisz, then programmer of the National Film Theatre, and a young BBC television dir...
