Pas d'amour pour Johnny

`No Love for Johnnie' is an enjoyable political drama whose sub-plot concerns the doomed love affair between the main character and a much younger woman. The nature of this relationship is undermined by the fact that 42 year old Johnnie Byrne is played by handsome, virile Peter Finch whereas Mary Peach playing 20 looks nearer 30 and Byrne's job as an MP in a Labour government would presumably make him even more attractive - remember Henry Kissinger's remark about the aphrodisiac nature of power?

The film takes a conventionally cynical view of politics; the Labour cabinet is referred to as `a gang of lawyers and university lecturers' so nothing much has changed since 1961. I felt that there was one too many shots of the admittedly magnificent Palace of Westminster from the other bank of the Thames and I certainly could not see any reason for Cinemascope as the action is almost exclusively indoors.

Stanley Holloway, always good value, playing a fellow-MP acts as a sort of conscious to Byrne but see if you can spot Oliver Reed in one scene with a waste-paper basket over his head, even then a party animal! And the brilliant Billie Whitelaw turns a neighbour who is little more than a doormat into a fully rounded character.

Maybe the `red menace' lurking in the background dates `No Love for Johnnie' but I found it most involving.

"No Love for Johnnie" is a most unusual movie that doesn't at all go in the directions you expect. I was actually pretty thrilled that repeatedly I was wrong about the film...and I love to be surprised.

When the film begins, Johnnie Byrne (Peter Finch) is told by his cold wife that she doesn't love him and she's leaving. Considering she's been very frigid and their relationship has been rather asexual, this should have come as a relief to Johnnie. However, there's a complication...he's a member of Parliament and his wife leaving might hurt his career. So might it hurt if he starts dating once again. But Jimmie has normal needs...and soon seeks out a girlfriend. What's to come of all this?

This is an interesting slice of life film. If you are expecting anything very dramatic or with a super-satisfying conclusion, look elsewhere. Instead, the film strives for realism and you really do have to feel sorry for him. Well worth seeing.

By the way, at the party scene where Johnnie is kissing a lady, the man counting off how long the kiss is Oliver Reed in one of his very brief early roles.

Count the number of reviews on this site for this 45 year old film. Less than seven at the time of writing. As a life long film fan I have now heard of and seen this movie (thanks to a fellow film fan on this site) but it remains very difficult to view. The number of reviews are indicative of how available it is to view be it on TV or via specialised cinemas. An asset very little exploited and that was a big clue as to why.

Despite the films age it is still relevant especially to British politics. Nothing at all has changed that the author was criticising via this fictional account of Westminster and its residents. Love affairs, power hungry, greed, self serving and back stabbing. It all still there - just read the newspapers in the last year here - but in 1958 they didn't have special people to spin the news like they do now. You get the top two men in Government coming out of rooms, obviously after a set to with fixed grins on their face and saying something like "We have had a frank discussion and are in complete agreement" - that sentence is never finished but would continue "in complete agreement that we loath each other"

In "No Love For Johnnie" the combatants were the likes of Stanley Holloway, Geoffrey Keen, Donald Pleasance, Peters Sallis and Barkworth and leading the field by a nose, Peter Finch. Everyone well played and instantly disliked by myself. Two characters only come out with the viewers sympathy, Flagg,(Dennis Price) not in the original book and Mary (a young Billie Whitelaw) who was obviously perfect for the Peter Finch character but he only saw her as a possible sexual conquest. The man was a fool.

It is also a wonderful bookend to Finch's later USA film "Network", where he goes into that famous rant on live TV against the likes of the character he played in this earlier film.

Despite this sterling cast - like the book it is based on it has been marginalised and is fast losing it mentions in film references books.Check Variety, Time Out. Hats off to Halliwell - it still lists it. For his loathsome performance, Finch won a BAFTA and a Berlin Silver Bear. A lost treasure of a film but now dug up by me and buffed up a bit.

So owners of this film - can I request you re-release it now! The reason I think it was buried in the first place is redundant now - check the title of this text. The book was the incendiary device - the film interpretation defused the bomb. Only Sikes/Sykes of the Earnley Herald remains.

The "No Love For Johnnie" book's blurb screamed "The Novel That Lifts The Lid Off Westminster". It is said REAL Members of Parliament sat around muttering darkly about who it was about - why do MPs always think it is about them? Oh yes - self serving. A question not then answered - perhaps because the author had unfortunately died before even his book was accepted and published, let alone a filmic version.

So the makers of the film version, sort of lifted the lid at Westminster, had a wee peek inside, didn't like what they saw and retreated a respectful distance. Shame really. It was still a shocking film albeit it diluted.

So fair do's - let the whole world see how New Politics was only Old Politics and evermore will be so.

No Love For Johnnie, I'm guessing did not have much of a release in the USA back when it was first made. Only political science students might grasped the significance of many of the happenings in this film. Of course that was before the BBC sent over its programs on our Public Network and we got a more humorous look at the UK's political system in Yes, Minister.

Peter Finch got one of his best screen roles in No Love For Johnnie as Johnnie Byrne recently re-elected Labour member of Parliament. He's got ambitions and he'll do whatever it takes to succeed, to get to the front benches where the Labour ministers sit when they're in power.

It's a tribute to Finch's talent as a player that he keeps so thoroughly dislikeable a person as Johnnie Byrne interested. He's got a wife, he's estranged from and a mistress he's cheating on also with yet another woman. The women in Finch's life respectively are Rosalie Crutchley, Billie Whitelaw and Mary Peach.

There's nothing he won't do, my favorite part of the film is when fellow back bench Labour ministers attempt a little palace coup against their Prime Minister, such people as Mervyn Johns and Donald Pleasance are involved. They have a script ready to follow and it's with Finch taking the lead. When the play is ready to commence, Finch is nowhere to be found, he's with Mary Peach delivering some constituent service. In fact their scenes, tame as they are today, would never have been in an American film of that era.

Actually Pleasance is also a really ruthless character himself, but apparently really dumb as well. I can't believe that what he was trying to do so totally depended on Finch in Parliament. I mean he couldn't have started the back bench revolt against Prime Minister Geoffrey Keen by improvising someone else to ask the pertinent questions. He gets back at Finch by raising some row with Finch's district constituents, that they almost give him a no confidence vote at a Labour Party district meeting. Imagine if we could do that here.

Stanley Holloway is another Labour minister, an older one who remembers Finch's parents who were right at the beginning of the founding of the Labour Party. He serves as the voice of integrity in the film. He alludes to some things that an American audience might not be aware of like the split during World War I which nearly wrecked the Labour Party during it's adolescence. An element of the party that Holloway apparently belonged to opposed British entry into World War I on pacifist grounds and some in fact did go to jail as conscientious objectors. One of those people who was a conscientious objector was James Ramsay MacDonald, Labour's first prime minister. Others in the Labour Party like Arthur Henderson joined the Coalition government to support the war.

Whether you believed what a MacDonald or apparently Finch's parents did was right isn't really the point. What Holloway says is that back in the day people had real beliefs and acted on them. Finch's lack of commitment to anything other than his ambition is the worst thing about his character. Sounds like a lot of people I know today.

Finch got a BAFTA award which is the UK's equivalent of the Oscar for Best Actor. The film in its searing cynicism is years ahead of its time. I suggest it could be remade today and find a much wider audience than it did in 1961.

This film was made in 1961 during Harold MacMillan's premiership and about a year before the Profumo scandal broke.So much of what is shown in the film was reflected in contemporary life.Of course parliamentary scandals would get worse culminating in the expenses fiddle.Peter Finch is excellent.However there are two aspects of the film which don't ring true.Firstly Mary Peach running off back home.Secondly the motion of no confidence.I am sure that this would have been squashed by the head office,as such an unlikely move would cause major embarrassment to a new government.Incidentally the red scare was quite real at the time,as apart from the Profumo scandal a small number of Labour MPs had contacts with iron curtain countries.