"What're you gonna do for a face when Jabba the Hut wants his arse back?"
Kirkby housewife Ronnie O'Dowd is the kind of woman who knows only one way to solve a problem; with her fists. However, when her problems mount up and the law catches up with her, it seems even she won't be able to fight her way out of this mess. Escaping Liverpool, she heads to New York in the hope of catching up with her estranged father, but soon finds a new set of problems to contend with. Can she use her fists to make ends meet in the land of the free?
Brother and sister team Frank and Margi Clarke scored a surprise hit in 1985 with Letter to Brezhnev which they respectively wrote and starred in. However lightning failed to strike twice for this 1991 follow up which marked brother Frank's directorial debut. Unfortunately, it's clear from this offering that he'd struggle to direct traffic and its unsurprising to learn it remains his only directing credit. The biggest issue is that when given the opportunity to film in New York, he makes his scenes there so nondescript, that they may as well have filmed it on the main street mock up at Granada Studios instead. The only flavour of America we get is from some B roll footage and the accompanying synthy, sub-Equalizer score from Dalek I Love You's Alan Gill. Given the lead role, Margi hardly fares any better with this opportunity either. Never the most subtle of performers she actually forgets to act here, opting to pose instead, so it's left to Hollywood legend Carroll Baker and solid character actor Ken Hutchison (Heathcliff in the BBC's 1970s version of Wuthering Heights, as well as StrawDogs) to liven up the proceedings on the periphery as Margi's estranged drunk of a father and his plastic surgery-loving faded glamourpuss friend. There's also Frank and Margi's sister Angela providing amusing support as a rather dim but well meaning gaolbird.
Perhaps the key problems (aside from the limp direction and preening central performance) for Blonde Fist is the fact that the script and storyline is pretty weak and when the film attempts to tug at the heartstrings it doesn't sit easily with the broad comedy around it. It occasionally threatens to catch fire, but it inevitably disappoints, and takes far too long to offer up any boxing, which is surely a cardinal sin for any boxing movie. I recall watching this as a nipper back in the early '90s and although even then I knew it was a dud, I did think it might have stood the test of time better. I was wrong. It's just hard to care about anyone or anything and the 98 minutes go by at a very plodding pace.
Directed, produced and writer by Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki and starring Frenchman Jean-Pierre Léaud, it's fair to say this droll and quirky London based dark comedy has a European sensibility. It also possesses a curiously stilted air that befits its sense of dislocation and can be best exemplified by self-styled 'Queen of Liverpool' Margi Clarke - then at the height of her fame with TV's Making Out - going to great pains to carefully enunciate each line she delivers for a change.
I Hired a Contract Killer concerns Henri, a lonely émigré who left France because, as he says, no one liked him there. Having washed up in London, he has spent the last 15 years as a clerk at a waterworks department, where no one seems to like him either. When the department is privatised by the government, Henri is made redundant. Believing his life no longer has any purpose, Henri attempts to take his own life but is beset by ill-fortune; the rope snaps scuppering his hanging, and a gas strike means he can't do away with himself by sticking his head in the oven either. Determined to wave goodbye to this cruel world, Henri explores the dark underbelly of the capital and hires a hit-man (a taciturn Kenneth Colley) to put him out of his misery; but after meeting flower-seller Margaret (Clarke) in a pub, he finds a reason to live and tries to cancel the contract.
Kaurismäki delivers a barely recognisable London yet it remains one which has a ring of authenticity, as befits seeing our culture through a foreign perspective. It's a deeply stylised film, with sharp colours providing contrast with the bleak overall cinematography. As the lead, Léaud lends the proceedings a suitably laconic, hangdog air - I especially laughed aloud at the scene where he stumbles upon a robbery at a pawnbrokers, a scene perfectly framed and performed by Kaurismäki and Léaud.
Look out to for a cameo from Joe Strummer as a pub musician.
Call me a sentimental old northerner, but the opening to Letter to Brezhnev remains one of my favourite moments of celluloid. Whilst budgetary constraints mean that it may not be as epic as it clearly wants to be, it nevertheless understands that Liverpool is a British city to be mythologised; we see Peter Firth and Alfred Molina's Russian sailors on deck in the last stretches of the Irish Sea, excited to clap eyes on the wondrous Three Graces of Liverpool by the evening light. Accompanied by Alan Gill's (Teardrop Explodes, Dalek I Love You) soaring score, the camera sweeps across the remaining stretch of water to rise up across the city skyline. It's the perfect love letter to the city.
And overall, Chris Bernard's film, from a script by Frank Clarke (adapted from his own stage play), continues to be the almost perfect love letter to Liverpool. Alexandra Pigg and Margi Clarke (Frank's sister) star as two salt of the earth Kirkby girls, Elaine and Teresa - the former a dreamer and the latter a realist - who optimistically head out into Liverpool one night whereupon they meet Peter (Firth) and Sergei (Molina) on shore leave.
Whilst the brassy Teresa enjoys a simple night of orgiastic pleasure with Sergei, Elaine finds something deeper with the more sensitive Firth. Like Cinderella at the stroke of midnight, come the next day the Russians have to reboard their ship and head back beyond the iron curtain, leaving Elaine heartbroken and lovesick, her only option to fix matters being the titular 'letter to Brezhnev'; a plea to be reunited with the man she loves.
It's a far from perfect film, it's rather naive and all too often it betrays its shoddy budget (Margi Clarke famously announced it was made for the equivalent of "the cocaine budget on Rambo") but it's heart is always in the right place. Its a film about daring to dream and having the courage to break out from the doldrums of Thatcher's Britain for love - even if that love just so happens to be in Soviet Russia.
What helps Letter to Brezhnev is the vibrant, energetic and exuberant performances from the cast which belie the brittle nature of the characters they portray. It's a film blessed with tough, rough charm and perhaps an unexpected romcom sweetness that has proven to be deeply influential in the years that followed (that first episode of Gavin and Stacey anyone?) Margi Clarke was never better than she was here and Peter Firth and Alexandra Pigg make the most affecting of star-crossed lovers.
Making Out was a brilliant drama about the lives and loves of a group of women working the production line at Manchester's New Line Electronics.
Written by Debbie Horsfield from an idea by Franc (Quadrophenia, Auf Wiedersehen Pet and Masterchef) Roddam, the show captured the essence of working class life in the north west under Thatcher, with many men on the dole queue bringing up the kids and keeping the home whilst their wives took to working instead. The show ran for three series on BBC1 from 1989 to 1991 and was compulsive viewing, as well as making household names of actors like Margi Clarke, Brian Hibbard, Shirley Stelfox, Tracie Bennett and Keith Allen to name but a few.
The series was filmed in and around Tameside, with the iconic former cotton mill Tame Valley Tower Mill, Dukinfield standing in for the girls workplace, New Line Electronics
In keeping with the series proud north west heritage, the music was provided by what was then Manchester's biggest band, New Order, who supplied an incidental and modified version of their song Vanishing Point
Annoyingly, the BBC have never seen fit to ever release Making Out, neither on video or DVD and it has never been repeated. It's therefore a mark of just how well loved it was and how quality it was that it is still fondly remembered by viewers of a certain age.
