Your Top Ten London-Based Films

Hummingbird.

 

Very good list. Nice to see The Small World of Sammy Lee and Melody get a mention

 

Cheers! Nice to see a fellow poster give them some appreciation! Both classics in my World.

 

10 Rillington Place
28 Days Later...

And some others. As a British person who lived in London for many years my perspective is different. Large parts of London don't feel like London. The City, for example, doesn't feel like London. It's the only part of London that makes money, and objectively it is London, but it's basically empty. Of a weekend there's no-one there and the shops are shut. Of a week it's full of people who don't want to live in London.

Other parts of London are filled with expensive flats and houses owned by people who rarely visit; conversely the reality of residential London is horrible. When people think of London they generally think of a small bunch of locations in the touristy parts, plus the likes of Notting Hill.

I suppose it's the same as New Yorkers and New York. When people think of New York they think of a few places, and films about those places. The reality of New York is nothing like that. Furthermore a lot of films are shot in London simply because it was the head of British film production for so long, and has some decent locations. Most of the examples above have nothing of London's spirit in them - A Fish Called Wanda, Spectre and An American Werewolf in London have specifically London locations but they don't have a London feel, whereas there's something oddly, specifically London about The IPCRESS File and Long Good Friday.

And for Londoners, London is "the default". It's normal and thus unremarkable. The rest of Britain wishes it could live in London - there's a routine where young people go there and work for a while - but when you do, London becomes uninteresting. The likes of Gregory's Girl, Local Hero, Get Carter etc have character because they take place in cute places where people have unusual accents and no-one else goes there. Whenever a television show or film takes place in a generic nowheresville it's basically London even if it's not.

Ninethly, the likes of Notting Hill and EastEnders are explicitly set in London, but don't feel like London films because they're a fantasy. A Clockwork Orange, for example, has some choice London architecture, but it's obviously supposed to be a futuristic everycity - it feels more like Manchester or Liverpool or somewhere that has white drug gangs.

Do residents of New York relate to Woody Allen's Manhattan? I genuinely don't know. I imagine that New Yorkers pooh-pooh the film openly because New Yorkers are hard, cynical people, but secretly they love it.

 

Lifeforce!

 

great choice!

 

Amazing. When I lived in Swiss Cottage in the '80s, my friend and I would go over there to walk around what's left of Rillington Place. Chilling.

 

Others that spring to mind:

Carry on Cabby
Passport to Pimlico
The Day the Earth Caught Fire
Otley
Up The Junction
Poor Cow

 

The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie was set in Edinburgh, not London

 

Blow Up
The Secret of Dorian Gray
(Both made by Italian directors)

 

Nil By Mouth
The Krays
Oliver!
Jack The Ripper - Mini Series
I.D

 

Oops.

 

I've never set foot in London...but I'm guessing that Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies features a nice dose of certain areas.

 

I should probably think a bit harder about this, but for now, at least:

Night and The City
Passport to Pimlico
Frenzy
A Clockwork Orange
Fires Were Started
Blowup
Repulsion
The Day The Earth Caught Fire
Blackmail
The Ipcress File

Though Georgy Girl, 10 Rillington Place, Murder by Decree, Great Expectations, Bedazzled (original, of course), Sabotage, Quatermass and the Pit and The Ladykillers

 

1. Mary Poppins
2. A Hard Day's Night
3. My Fair Lady
4. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (or really any of 'em)
5. The Ladykillers
6. Beautiful Thing
7. Peter Pan
8. Sid and Nancy
9. Bedknobs and Broomsticks
10. 101 Dalmations

 

Theatre of Blood.

 

Attack The Block, DEFINITELY!

I loved that film, and it was my wife's favorite film of the year...and she saw more than 300 films that year.

It was a London film, and wouldn't make much sense anywhere else, although you might be able to make a New York version.

 

That's my experience, too.

 

No love for Brannigan?!?

 

Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.
The Black Room.
Foreign Correspondent.
The Man Who Knew Too Much (second half in London).
Day of the Triffids.
Mary Poppins.
My Fair Lady.

 

Withnail and I