Till Death Us Do Part

The Film of the Successful TV series "Till Death us do part" undoubtedly is one of the better TV to Film adaptations. Norman Cohen as mentioned has directed this superbly. (In comparison to Carry On Engalnd you can believe the war situation!) The Whole cast is present from the TV Series which is a bonus in itself. (Of which let down films such as Rising Damp - easier to not do it at all) Warren Mitchell & Dandy Nichols really do play up to expectations.

Usual errors within TV-Film adaptations is Recycled Material and/or weak plot lines/jokes. Till death us do part exceeds all these pitfalls and comes out trumps.

As Alf would say "bloody marvellous innit!" - and i would attribute that to this film!

Introducing the background to the television series, this film starts just before the War with Alf Garnett recently married and living in an attached house in the East End. Then it switches to the contemporary era, the world cup match in 1964 and the councils decision to demolish the house and move them to a high rise in Essex.

----------- I'd just like to point out a few factual errors promoted by Speight :

The housing in the east end demolished by Wilson was of very poor quality and in many cases falling down. It was poorly made in the first place and the east end was one of the most heavily bombed areas in the War. Garnett has an outside flush toilet but many houses only had a "short drop" toilet and relied on a nightcart service. When the Thames valley flooded in the early 1960s, there was a big outbreak of Tyhoid fever - this is when it was decided to demolish the area.

Speight has Garnett travelling long periods to work - in fact the container port was moved to Folkestone after the building of the Thames barrage (the bulk port had moved decades before) as the large ships could not enter so there was very little employment in the area.

While its technically true about the high rise (they were an elderly couple and the children were not on the lease but sponging), families were given semis not flats so the story is misleading.

I first saw this film, when it was originally released in 1969 at the ABC Edgware (now, a block of flats and a gym, very much in line with the film's partial theme of community break-up), but was somewhat disappointed because it didn't contain the original music nor - until three-quarters into the film, the original format - Alf, Else, their daughter Una Stubbs and Tony Booth as her husband the "scouse git". Now, 37 years on, I think differently. Although somewhat episodic, it beautifully captures a bygone era, with excellent footage of London during WW2, a good feel of the old East End, plus old-fashioned pub culture without the plastic fittings and lager and the traditional family all eating around the table. There is the quaint working class Tory ethos embodied by Alf, not quite, the not for the likes of us of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, rather the loyal, home-owning, small-minded bigotry of someone who perceives himself as a self-made man, who has not made quite as much as he thinks he deserves.

There are some lovely home-truths and vignettes within this setting: the £1,500 paid for the house (not a bad price in this day and age!), the mortgage from the Council and the scrimping and saving to pay it off. Dandy Nicholls as the "silly old moo" housewife ultimately wears the trousers and guides the household through. There is also pathos from Alf's 5 shilling contribution to the Church in the hope his two up, two down will not be demolished to make way for flats and ultimately bathos, as the family is forced to move to a high rise block in Essex, where community and the sense of community hardly exist.

No more, the chat with the neighbour while carrying out ablutions through the wall of the outside "bog", the sheets of newspaper, which, during the war-scenes, enabled Alf to wipe his posterior with Hitler's picture, long since gone. It is far closer to reality than the fluffy adverts with the dog and the loo-roll of the present day.

Hopefully, the old-fashioned racism depicted by Johnny Speight with his sharp ear for dialogue and knowledge of the area, dissipated throughout the '70's and '80's as even Alf-like characters got to admire national role models such as Trevor MacDonald and Lenny Henry.The World Cup footage, presumably from Goal, interspersed with Alf and son-in-law in the Wembley crowd, were more evocative than most of the four-yearly diatribes we get as the England team seek to emulate their predecessors, with higher expectations than the results could possibly justify.

It is very much Warren Mitchell's film, his performance stands in comparison with any of those in more critically acclaimed '60's films such as This Sporting Life or the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Norman Cohen, the director, deserves credit for this too.

All in all, a worthy and atmospheric social drama with, yes, a little comedy, which being what it is, contributes to a period piece, which has stood the test of time well.

One-off movies based on TV sit-com series seldom work, which is probably the reason there aren't more of them. Generally they fall into the trap of expanding material that sits well in a half-hour slot but when stretched to feature length comes out as interminable even for the fans. "The Inbetweeners Movie" is a classic example of how not to do it. I must admit I approached the 1969 film of "Till Death do us Part" with some trepidation on this score only to finish up with more than a degree of pleasant surprise. Norman Cohen's Alf Garnett saga works well for the very reason it is just that - a saga spanning the second world war before hopping on twenty years. It crams in a tremendous amount, sometimes almost too much. A lengthy sequence in which Alf and his "Scouse git" son-in-law drunkenly attend Britain's World Cup victory seems just an excuse for including some archive newsreel footage. And then there are those monologues such as Alf's church prayer for salvation against being re-housed and his acceptance in a dream of an honour bestowed by "Her Gracious Majesty" that have a silliness bordering on the embarrassing. Not so two deliriously funny sequences, one where the old "moo" joins in a sing-song in a London underground shelter during the blitz, another a riotously drunken wedding celebration that has the energy one finds in the best of Fellini and Ford. Quite some achievement! But possibly the most memorable feature of "Till Death do us Part" is its re-creation of those dusty East End streets during the dark days of the war. In such scenes the film touches on the special.

I gave this a 6, cinemawise. For those of you who saw the series, it was a 3 or 4. I got 12 episodes of later years from Canada. The earlier years were a scream on the BBC, but then I was younger. This movie had little of its zip.