By Matthew Field
The BFI's Flipside label continues on its mission to
expose the hidden history of British cinema, presenting a little seen film
which explores changing attitudes towards sex and gender equality in 1960s Britain
– Lunch Hour.
Shirley
Anne Field is best remembered for her flawless performances in Karel
Reisz’ Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning and Tony
Richardson’s The Entertainer. But her
personal favourite from this era is this little known self-contained drama. Field gives a fiery performance as a young
designer on the brink of an affair with a married male executive (Robert
Stephens) at the company where she works. With a tightly-focused plot telling
the story of an illicit lunch-hour rendezvous in ‘real-time’, this is a stylish
and highly-charged story of subterfuge, simmering tensions and sexual conflict.
Lunch Hour was directed by
documentary filmmaker James Hill who later went on to helm Born Free. Previously
a radio play and a theatre production, it was adapted for the screen in 1962. Written by John
Mortimer - a British barrister who
later became a dramatist, screenwriter
and author – it’s been said that the script was semi-autobiographical. In the accompanying
booklet film historian Sue Harper points out “The sexual radicalism of Lunch Hour owes something to his
marriage [Mortimer] to his first wife Penelope. The couple had a tumultuous
relationship, and it’s possible to argue that John Mortimer’s guilt about his
many adulteries, provided a stimulus for Lunch
Hour.†The original lead in the stage play was Wendy Craig by whom Mortimer
had a son. According to Harper he then actively pursued Field during the
production, after having offered her agent generous percentages to appear in
the film.