This collection of exciting new research on British cinema of the 1960s reconsiders and reframes the film culture that emerged from that tumultuous decade. Challenging assumptions around Sixties stardom, the book focuses on creative collaboration and the contribution of production personnel beyond the director, and discusses how cultural change is reflected in both film style and cinematic themes. With perspectives and insights from established scholars and new critical voices, Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered draws on under-explored archival resources to explore four key research areas: stars and stardom; creative collaborations in filmmaking; developments in genre and film style; and how the cinema of the period both responded and contributed to social and cultural transformation in the 1960s.

Challenging assumptions around Sixties stardom, the book focuses on creative collaboration and the contribution of production personnel beyond the director, and discusses how cultural change is reflected in both film style and cinematic themes.

"Challenging assumptions around Sixties stardom, the book focuses on creative collaboration and the contribution of production personnel beyond the director, and discusses how cultural change is reflected in both film style and cinematic themes."--Publisher description.

British films of the 1960s are undervalued. Their search for realism has often been dismissed as drabness and their more frivolous efforts can now appear just empty-headed. Robert Murphy's Sixties British Cinema is the first study to challenge this view. He shows that the realist tradition of the late 50s and early 60s was anything but dreary and depressing, and gave birth to a clutch of films remarkable for their confidence and vitality: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving, and A Taste of Honey are only the better known titles. Sixties British Cinema revalues key genres of the period - horror, crime and comedy - and takes a fresh look at the 'swinging London' films, finding disturbing undertones that reflect the cultural changes of the decade. Now that our cinematic past is constantly recycled on television, Murphy's informative, engaging and perceptive review of these films and their cultural and industrial context offers an invaluable guide to this neglected era of British cinema.

Making substantial use of new and underexplored archive resources that provide a wealth of information and insight on the period in question, this book offers a fresh perspective on the major resurgence of creativity and international appeal experienced by British cinema in the 1960s

The story of Eastmancolor's arrival on the British filmmaking scene is one of intermittent trial and error, intense debate and speculation before gradual acceptance. This book traces the journey of its adoption in British Film and considers its lasting significance as one of the most important technical innovations in film history. Through original archival research and interviews with key figures within the industry, the authors examine the role of Eastmancolor in relation to key areas of British cinema since the 1950s; including its economic and structural histories, different studio and industrial strategies, and the wider aesthetic changes that took place with the mass adoption of colour. Their analysis of British cinema through the lens of colour produces new interpretations of key British film genres including social realism, historical and costume drama, science fiction, horror, crime, documentary and even sex films. They explore how colour communicated meaning in films ranging from the Carry On series to Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), from Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to A Passage to India (1984), and from Goldfinger (1964) to 1984 (1984), and in the work of key directors and cinematographers of both popular and art cinema including Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell, Ridley Scott, Peter Greenaway and Chris Menges.

Between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, British cinema experienced an explosion of X-certificated films. In parallel with an era marked by social, political, and sexual ferment and upheaval, British filmmakers and censors pushed and guarded the permissible limits of violence, horror, revolt, and sexuality on screen. Adult Themes is the first volume entirely devoted to the exploration of British X certificate films across this transformative period, since identified as 'the long 1960s'. How did the British Board of Film Censors, harried on one side by the censorious and moralistic, and beset on the other by demands for greater artistic freedom, oversee and manage this provocative body of films? How did the freedoms and restrictions of the X certificate hasten, determine, and reshape post-war British cinema into an artistic, exploitational, and unapologetically adult medium? Contributors to this collection consider these central questions as they take us to swinging parties, on youthful crime sprees, into local council meetings, on police raids of cinemas, and around Soho strip clubs, and introduce us to mass murderers, lesbian vampires, apoplectic protestors, eroticised middle-aged women, and rebellious working-class men. Adult Themes examines both the workings and negotiations of British film censorship, the limits of artistic expression, and a wider culture of X certificate cinema. This is an important volume for students and scholars of British Film History and censorship, Media Studies, the 1960s, and Cultural and Sexuality Studies, while simultaneously an entertaining read for all connoisseurs of British cinema at its most vivid and scandalous.