Quadrophenia (1979, Dir. Franc Roddam)

Synopsis:

1964: Rival gangs of Mods and Rockers clash throughout the country. Erstwhile Mod, Jimmy (Phil Daniels) spends his evenings and weekends hanging out with his Mod friends and riding around on his scooter, to escape the mundanity of his job as an office boy and his increasingly strained relationship with his parents. He’s besotted with Steph (Leslie Ash) even though she already has a boyfriend and when he, Steph and all his friends travel down to Brighton for the weekend, he grabs the chance to be with her as much as possible. For a brief moment, Jimmy seems to get every thing he wants: Steph and notoriety as a Mod, before it all falls apart when he’s arrested during the clashes between the Mods and Rockers and the police on Brighton seafront. As Jimmy’s world crumbles, he wonders what to do next.

I’ve written a number of times about films that I see as underrated, even though they did well on their initial release, due to them being largely forgotten about in the intervening years. Some films, however, belong to an even smaller group that seem to slowly oscillate from cult favourite to relative obscurity and back again. Certainly Quadrophenia, a film that despite being inspired by a concept album manages to do that rare thing for films based on albums or musicals — succeed so well as a film in its own right, that you can almost forget its connection to the album that spawned it or even the band The Who, is one of those cases in my opinion.

It didn’t do too well on its initial release in 1979, but went on to have a life on VHS in the 80s and 90s. I first saw it as a teenager, via a friend’s video that he’d recorded off of the TV, which crucially didn’t have the opening shots of Jimmy walking back from the edge of Beachy Head in the sunset, leaving me to wonder about his eventual fate at the end of the film. The prurient tv censors of the time also excised both the scene where Jimmy and Kevin first meet up in the public baths and and parts of the scene where Jimmy and his friends break into the chemists in search of some blues. Most of my friends at the time had never even heard of it. It would take the film’s cinema re-release in 1997, (when I was finally able to see it on the big screen — in this case, the now closed ABC Cinema in Brighton’s East Street, where the riot takes place in the film. You can just about make out the entrance and steps in front of the cinema in one shot of the aftermath of the riot, where the injured mods are sitting around as the police take away Jimmy and Ace in the van), capitalizing on a resurgence of interest in 70s youth films, such as this and Alan Clarke’s Scum (which, of course, also starred both Phil Daniels and Ray Winstone), plus the connection with Trainspotting through cinematographer Brian Tufano and Phil Daniels’ appearance on Blur’s Parklife, to establish it as a cult classic in the minds of many of “my generation” (sorry!).

Since then its profile seems to have dipped once more. Does that ultimately make it “underrated”? I think so. Interestingly, I saw it again at the Duke Of York’s cinema in Brighton, with some friends who’d never seen it, in 2014. Perhaps because of my friends’ negative reaction, I found it rather dated and trite. Certainly, it didn’t seem to have the hold on me that it had when I’d seen it as 16 or 19 year old, but when I re-watched it again for this post I found myself loving it once more.

Obviously, for me having been a small child at the time it was filmed, it conjures up vivid memories of what my home town looked like back then: quite scruffy and run down compared to its how gentrified its become these days, but it’s more than just personal nostalgia for a version of the place where I grew up that brings me back to this film so many years later — it’s a decent, well made film with a story that many teenagers (certainly male ones) can relate to: wanting to be cool, wanting to go out with the prettiest girl, hanging out with your mates and, despite some grumbles from actual mods at the time of release that it wasn’t that accurate, its sense of time and place are really good and in the intervening 40 years since its initial release, this is something that has helped the film keep its power in a way that many contemporary 60s or 70s films haven’t.

First time director Franc Roddam coaxes some great performances out of his young cast, many of whom came straight from stage school and had had little to no movie experience before this. Phil Daniels particularly, leaves an indelible impression as Jimmy. As youthful protagonists go, he’s up there with Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange, Ray Winstone in Scum and Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting. However, it’s not just Daniels — all of the cast are perfect in their roles and as such it’s not that surprising that many of them became typecast into similar roles for the rest of the careers. The supporting cast in almost a Who’s Who (pun intended) of British acting talent from the 70s and 80s, with Timothy Spall, Daniel Peacock, Phil Davis and Michael Elphick all making an appearance. Future pop stars Sting and Toyah Wilcox are also there and whilst Sting isn’t given much to do other than glower in the background and look cool for most of the scenes he’s in, Toyah’s performance as Monkey is both brilliant and tragic. It’s clear she loves Jimmy but he only has eyes for Steff, and despite not having that many scenes she manages to give the character considerable depth.

The cinematography by Tufano has a great semi documentary quality to it, with nighttime exteriors looking as if they were shot with very few lights and interiors mostly with practicals. The music by The Who (and others) compliments the action but never overpowers it, using the songs from the album to soundtrack Jimmy’s internal state of mind whilst using period correct songs within the film — a bold move for a film based on a concept album — in fact, I’d argue that one of the film’s greatest strengths is that it owes far more to the likes of Ken Loach and Alan Clarke than it does Ken Russell’s film adaption of Tommy or later rock music films such as Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

If you’ve never seen the film, either because it passed you by or because the concept album connection put you off, or even if you have and like me haven’t revisited it for some years, then perhaps it’s time to give Jimmy and his friends another chance and travel back in time and down to Brighton once more for a film that manages to escape the shackles of a concept album and sits comfortably amongst some the best British cinema of the 1970s.