London hub
Junction London (Original title: Up the Junction ) is a British feature film directed by Peter Collinson from 1967. The screenplay was written by Roger Smith . It is based on the novel "Life in Battersea" by Nell Dunn , who was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1964 for this work . The main roles are cast with Suzy Kendall , Dennis Waterman and Alfie Bass . In the country of production, the film was first released on January 25, 1968.
action
Young and elegant Polly gets out of a Rolls-Royce that has brought her from the wealthy London district of Chelsea to poor Battersea , looks for work in a factory, rents a slum apartment, makes friends with colleagues and meets Peter. Two worlds collide: Polly is looking for the “simple life”, she admires Battersea and finds everything beautiful, she has come here so that she doesn't have to pretend, to live genuinely and naturally. She doesn't want to be a parasite anymore; because wealth only destroys all that is good and makes one lying and useless. Peter, on the other hand, sees ugliness where Polly sees beauty; he dreams himself away from the dingy environment, in which one only has the freedom to “be a poor pig”.
Little by little, Polly gets to know the realistic, bad sides of the milieu, but she sticks to her resolution anyway. On a weekend, the two of them drive to the seaside in a sports car, stay in an expensive hotel, eat in the best restaurants according to Peter's ideas of fine life, and when he alludes to the fact that this life could go on forever if they got married yes money, she declares her definitive renunciation of wealth. That's enough for him and he makes it clear to her that everyone in the neighborhood knows that she is basically rich, that she only satisfies her self-pity with the role that she is only playing. - They break up. Peter is arrested because the sports car was stolen for the trip.
With the help of a friend of her father's, Polly manages to see Peter again; but the two positions are incompatible. At the end, Polly stands there crying and perplexed, between the two worlds.
criticism
The evangelical film observer draws the following conclusion: “Although not explicitly political, the excellently played and staged film forces one to think about political and sociological issues such as the existence of classes, the lack of communication between them, the influence of the environment on the way of life and conception of life. Also worth seeing and recommended for a wider audience. ”The lexicon of the international film, on the other hand, describes the work succinctly as“ irrelevant melodrama ”.
Web link
- London hub in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Source: Evangelischer Filmbeobachter , Evangelischer Presseverband München, Review No. 105/1969, pp. 106-107
- ↑ Lexicon of International Films, rororo-Taschenbuch No. 6322 (1988), p. 2055