The Frontline is the debut feature film from Boston Kickout director Paul Hills. Aged just 21 and armed with enthusiasm and naivety Hills wrote, produced, directed and edited The Frontline, a film which took three years to complete from 1990 to 1993.
Vincent Phillips stars as James King, a young man newly released from a psychiatric hospital in London. Given his freedom, he hitches a ride up to Manchester, and the run down and tumultuous Moss Side area, keen to look up an old flame in the shape of local pirate radio DJ, Marion (Amanda Noar). At first she's reluctant to reignite their passion, but eventually the pair resume their love affair - an affair that runs the risk of breaking down when Marion's drug addiction becomes apparent. James makes it his mission to help Marion kick the habit and get clean and just when the future is looking rosy for them both, Marion winds up dead and her murder seems to point towards a man with some considerable power in the region; local MP, William Armstrong (Renny Krupinski).
The eponymous 'Frontline' itself refers to Moss Side and Hulme. Back in the '80s and early '90s, this was an impoverished no-go area in which gangs were profligate and danger lurked around every corner. Left more or less to fend for themselves, the residents created their own resources, including pirate radio and it was here that the tightrope between 'Madchester' and 'Gunchester' was walked. As a time capsule it's quite a worthwhile document, capturing as it does the urban decay and destruction from a decades worth of Tory rule in what proved to be the dying days of their regime, as well as attempting to highlight the cities creative and eccentric culture and the cross-over in casting Factory Records impresario Tony Wilson in his day job as a TV journalist with Granada Reports, there on the scene for the film's bloody denouement. Even John Mundy from BBC's Northwest Tonight pops up in a film that isn't blessed with familiar faces or star names. In fact reliable character actors Geoffrey Leesley (Bergerac, Casualty and Brookside) and a young Tim Dantay (Alan Partridge's builder friend) are probably the most recognisable faces for audiences, and if you're familiar with your Mancunian rock from the period, you'll see some live footage from the New Fast Automatic Daffodils performing in a club scene.
The key theme in Hills' feature is the notion of insanity being both condemned and condoned depending on your class and status; Moss Side is essentially an example of that old adage about 'the lunatics taking over the asylum' and it is ironic that the newly released James sets up home there. But the real psychotic in the plot is Renny Krupinski's killer, the privileged William Armstrong MP, a man whose dangerous mental health is kept largely hidden and ignored.
However this is an extremely low budget debut feature and one that was extremely difficult to create, so it's not surprising that the overall result is a bit of a noble failure. Hills himself has described the three year long process as an absolute nightmare; in the film's initial stages, he was sleeping rough in Manchester Piccadilly and subsequently progressed to sleeping on the floors of cast and crew once he had assembled them, basically for no money whatsoever. Each day's filming ran the risk of running out of film at any given moment, meaning often only two takes were ever done. It makes for an amateurish, rough and ready end product and, by Hills' own admittance, he was perhaps to young and naive to attempt such a film in the first place. It's true that the essential message of 'drugs are bad, and so is the establishment' is a painfully earnest and sketchy one from a young filmmaker and he seems to struggle between a straight attempt at social realism and something more heightened (the scenes featuring the police are especially heightened and fit awkwardly around everything else). The on-the-hoof nature of the shoot means that it's sometimes hard to make sense of some sequences and I'm not sure the plot holds up to much scrutiny either, but what cannot be denied is that this is quite an impressive effort from a first time filmmaker with zero budget and a myriad of pressures. Hills' next feature, Boston Kickout, was a marked improvement that was no doubt achieved by the lessons he learnt here.
"There's loads to do in Stevenage...if you like concrete"
"I fucking hate this town"
Stevenage. No offence to anyone who hails from there, but it really is a shithole. I can just about say this, as I used to go out with a girl from there and visited its grim concrete desolation row regularly. It's telling that the two most famous films made in Stevenage, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush and this, chart the decline from optimism to pessimism of these government sponsored urban landscapes that were built upon the rural and undeveloped areas of our land in the postwar period to help accommodate the 'overspill' from deprived inner city areas. In the earlier film the mood is bright and breezy for our young freewheeling protagonists, but by the time we reach the 1990s of Boston Kickout, the youth on display are emphatically disillusioned. The film, from writer/director Paul Hills, is a semi-autobiographical tale about his own experiences growing up in the town.
Phil (John Simm) moved from London to Stevenage as a child with his father (Derek Martin) in the 1980s shortly after witnessing his mother's suicide. Now it is 1991 and Phil and his friends, Ted (Andrew Lincoln), Matt (Nathan Valente) and Steve (Richard Hanson), have just left school and are caught in that limbo period of the 'final' summer; waiting for the exam results that will shape their adult lives. Ted, effortlessly cool, is keen to break out of the stifling atmosphere of his hometown and promptly disappears in dramatic fashion on that first night of freedom - perhaps because he knows that if you stick around any longer you'll end up like Steve's older brother, Robert (a scene-stealing Marc Warren), a wild skinhead who revels in his small town legend; "I've been thrown out of every club in Stevenage!" he gleefully proclaims after the bouncers chuck him into the street for glassing someone. "There's only two!" Phil points out, but it does little to deflate his sense of achievement.
Caught between these two extremes is Phil and Simm's performance of understated charm serves as the perfect balance. Feeling somewhat lost without the routine of school and with his best mate Ted AWOL, Phil drifts through a dead-end summer job at a bakery whilst indulging in his pastime of photography, not really knowing what he wants to do with his life, or what he wants from it. The developments of his friends - Matt gets engaged and Steve's behaviour becomes increasingly strange - provides him with some surprising distractions, but he only gets something of his own when his Shona, his outgoing Irish cousin (Emer McCourt) visits, leading to romance. This too however, proves to be a momentary distraction and, when his father attempts suicide, Phil must ultimately make a decision to either accept his lot and become absorbed by his peers and the culture around him, or break out and seek to achieve his potential.
Boson Kickout is a sadly overlooked film, perhaps because it was quickly lost in the wave of more successful and better remembered films such as Trainspotting and Human Traffic, which also starred Simm, an effective poster boy for the Britpop 90s, and featured some of the same production team, including a producer credit Emer McCourt. It's a shame, because I think overall Boston Kickout is a more contemplative and mature offering than the enjoyably cartoonish antics of Human Traffic, with themes that are perhaps less dated, and is certainly better than the Trainspotting wannabes that followed in its wake. It's easy to see why Simm, Lincoln and Warren went on to bigger and better things, but sadly Valente and Hanson did not, and their somewhat anonymous performances perhaps tell that tale.
I'd recommend the film for anyone who grew up or came of age in the 1990s, it's choice soundtrack (Oasis, The Stone Roses, Primal Scream etc) and the fashions (I was amused to see that Ted dressed exactly like I did in the '90s and the early '00s - I had exactly the same leather jacket and a fondness for obscure T-shirts, and given that I have short dark, wavy/curly hair just like Lincoln's, it was quite an out-of-body experience!) will certainly bring back memories, and if you lived in a new town or a dead end town, you'll appreciate that sense of being young and alive but being held back and a little scared of taking the leap. It's not perfect, but it is a funny and touching coming-of-age drama that I had a good time with.
Oh and the title? It refers to the game that Phil et al played as kids, jumping over the fences of neighbouring homes and trashing their gardens.
