El retrato de un rebelde

The year of 1967 was significant for the 'swinging London', psychedelic music and some of the craziest movies ever made. This fine film from the much derided Michael Winner is one of the very good ones. Much use is made of UK locations, London, Cambridge and small but accurate details like the colourful boutiques and rather the awful public school. Also very apt for the time is the idea that work should be 'honest', that joint the 'rat race' or treadmill of life was all wrong. That there was an alternative. The concept of free love also prevalent at the time is also much to the fore although Winner does not shy away from tackling the downside, divorce, jealousy, children etc. But, this is a colourful and mostly cheerful film with great performances from a host of British stars. Reed is great, Carol White does very well, as does Wendy Craig (don't think I've seen her in her underwear before!) and must also mention delightful cameo from a gorgeous looking Marianne Faithful. It's all much ado about nothing essentially but there is an edge to this and it is a very accurate slice of life in 1967.

Although constructed around "swinging " London this tale of futility in the pursuit of happiness endures. Oliver Reed will come as a surprise to most people who would not have thought the latter day hell raiser could deliver such a sensitive performance as the central character Andrew Quint.

A successful advertising exec Quint belabours the notion of a simple life and eschews the trappings of his current situation ( both professional and domestic ) to work at a small literary magazine with a friend from his days at Oxford. These trappings include two mistresses and an ex wife. The scenes with the mistresses are perhaps the least pleasing of the whole film.

"I never really saw the money anyway, it came in and went out ; if I felt like being successful I'd go and buy a new shirt"

A series of symbolic events unfold ( most notably a public school reunion and the pointless death of his new girlfriend )which only serve in Quint considering joining an equally exploitative competitor to the ad agency he quit at the outset.

Pretty poor film in terms of plot and structure but interesting as a glimpse of a long gone London and for some lovely footage of Cambridge.

Also worth casting your eye over the cast, Welles looking bloated and unwell, Reed's striking looks somewhat dented by the facial scarring as a result of a 1963 bar fight and Carol White youthful and beautiful before her succumbing in following years to substance addiction. Michael Winner makes one his final Brit films before moving to Hollywood and it's certainly no classic, kind of a 'Garden State' of its day - episodic but contrived and laboured.

However, England looks good and the 60s do look pretty swinging.

Another 1960's collaboration from director Michael Winner with actor Oliver Reed, I'LL NEVER FORGET WHATS'ISNAME has an obvious and incredibly intended message from the get-go as Reed, a young and successful ad man, comes to work wielding an ax, destroying his own desk before quitting to his literally big boss Orson Welles, who, with every significantly-spoken one-liner, represents the evils of commercialism...

The movie feels like either a direct sequel to an original story showing how Reed's Andrew Quint became a success or that it started twenty-minutes in... Either way, with so much anger towards this occupation right off the bat... or ax... the writer has more things to say than the characters...

In this case Peter Draper of Winner/Reed's first and overall greatest joint, THE SYSTEM aka THE GIRL-GETTERS, which took time to flesh-out Reed and his cronies strategically chasing girls...

Not much different in Reed's specific case: while he quit a lucrative job for an old position writing for an indie magazine, he still loves (and is loved by) the ladies, including separated wife Wendy Craig, seductive lover Marianne Faithful and this film's innocent ingenue Carol White...

Who's the best thing going here... the POOR COW starlet playing a kind of comparably naive and ambiguous witness (the jerks are jerks and the good guys perfect idealists) for both Reed and the audience as director Winner... using surreal/psychedelic montages and flashbacks popular in this era, herein showcasing London's Swinging Sixties... traipses through a partial mind-trip sporadically weaving in and out of reality...

Before ultimately finding a genuine plot-line when Reed, forced back into working for the monopolizing Orson, finds his revenge by making a loaded, telegraphed thus predictable commercial in a counter-culture study that's often easier on the eyes (creative/intriguing visuals) than ears (forced/contrived dialogue).

Universal like many other American film companies came to London in the sixties.Films like this made them retreat back to Hollywood.Pretentious at best boring at worst.All of the leading actors died an early death due to one form of over indulgence or another.