If you’re given to the act of thinking, there’s forever a
sense of doubt attached to ‘established’ social history – a nagging feeling
that the more interesting aspects of an era may be buried beneath a ton of
cultural dogma. Bronco Bullfrog, shot
on location in the East End in 1969 by Barney Platt-Mills, is a smashing,
monochromatic example of such marginalia – the surly, underage sibling of Blow-Up and Performance, as insouciant and attitudinal as the latter two are
self-conscious.
The actors were a bunch of Stratford and West Ham kids coaxed
off the streets by Joan Littlewood’s theatre company and the film’s plot is as
Spartan as the largely improvised dialogue: 17-year-old half-hearted hooligan
Del meets 15-year-old Irene. His dad and her mum disapprove (her dad’s in the
clink) and so the pair take to their relationship to the streets with all the ennui
and frustration of a million teen couples before and since. Society at large
offers them no space, merely insists they sit their frustration out. They do this in Wimpy Bars, derelict prefabs and late night strip-lit cafés over tea-spattered Formica table tops. Then they hook up with the titular character,
who’s fresh out of Borstal. Ironically, the no-hoper status this should
immediately consign him to is initially scotched by the fact he’s the only kid
in E15 who’s captain of his own ship.
And yet, the film’s sense of social realism is such that
Bronco, Del and Irene gradually appear to have no hope of escaping the gravitational
pull of their background. When asked why he bothered coming back to the
two-decade-old bombsites of Stratford when he could have gone up "the other end”,
Bronco replies that he “don’t know anyone there”. The King’s Road, that
attention-seeking poseur’s promenade that holds every phoney sixties memory in
its strangulating grip, was a mere Circle Line ride away, but might as well
have been one of Saturn’s moons. The characters’ lack of zeal in all their acts
– sex, thieving, scrapping, boozing - suggest a bleak sense of fatalism: that all that might happen to them has already done so.
Bronco Bullfrog is
sharper than any frenetic, kinetic contemporary yoof flick owing to what it leaves
out. The minimalist dialogue would likely make a modern young audience
uncomfortable (and would freak an American one out). Ten minutes of film which would now be filled with street babble here features 30 seconds of awkward,
parsimonious teen dialogue (“Wanna go out wiv me tomorrow night?” “OK” “Alright,
see ya”), which briefly make it a comedy of embarrassment.
I’ve heard this film described as a monument to Mod more
than a few times. Not quite. While there’s
no conscious sense of subcultural identity or tribalism evident among the kids
of Bronco Bullfrog, this lot are
actually the end product of Hard Mods, i.e. suedeheads: those whose means were
as slender as their silhouettes and for who petrol-blue Italian mohair suits
were out, but Sta-prest, button-down shirts and steel-capped leather boots were
in. Unlike the loon-panted, cravat-sporting scions of SW3, they do not look in
any way ridiculous to modern eyes (the doe-eyed, loose-locked Irene looks
unnervingly contemporary). It’s thus a shame that the original soundtrack
doesn’t reflect the subculture in question. Surely skanking bluebeat and ska
would have trumped the longhair, bass-heavy sounds of The Audience, given the
proto-Skin nature of the protagonists.
The unbilled character here is London. Bronco Bullfrog is a pin-sharp hymn of authenticity to a vanished
section of the capital now host more to the ubiquitous than the unique. There
are glimpses of Hackney Speedway (now buried beneath the Olympic stadium), an
unpedestrianised Leicester Square in a trip Up West, freshly-set concrete
flyovers over which Del drives Irene, pillion-style and even a working dock,
probably the last of its kind. In the distance, Balfron Tower is visible, a
symbol, along with the high-rise Irene lives in with her mother, of an
anticipated future that never arrived.
No comments:
Post a Comment