The second of the releases from BFI and Flipside for April is Joanna, a former big-screen presentation from the Flipside and reviewed by us here when it was on that big screen.
17-year-old Joanna (Genevieve Waite) is cool, stylish, and determined to start a new life as an art student in swinging sixties London. She indulges in the pleasures of casual sexual encounters, colourful daydreams and an impromptu trip to Morocco with the wise and debonair Lord Peter Sanderson (Donald Sutherland). But when Joanna falls in love with Gordon (Calvin Lockhart), from Sierra Leone, her life begins to get complicated.
We're always happy to see some new discs incoming from the BFI offshoot Flipside, with Lunch Hour being the first of the new releases for April.
Based on a John Mortimer play, Lunch Hour, from 1962, stars Shirley Anne Field (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) as a young designer on the brink of an affair with a married male executive (Robert Stephens) at the company where she works. This story of an illicit lunch-hour rendezvous is shot in 'real-time' and is described as a 'stylish and highly-charged story of subterfuge, simmering tensions and sexual conflict'.
Regular reader will know that the original version of And Soon The Darkness is one of our favourite films. The work of the team behind The Avengers and set in rural France in 1970, the film has been remade, with much the same scenario, in Argentina. That version is getting a reissue on DVD this month.
In the remake, best friends Stephanie and Ellie decide to head off on their own for the final days of the trip hoping to find a bit more fun before having to head back home to the US. They wind up in a pretty rural village and spend the evening getting drunk in a bar, where Ellie picks up a handsome local while Stephanie heads back to their hotel alone intending to get a good night’s sleep. Stephanie is soon awoken by a booze-fuelled altercation between Ellie and her new 'friend', which is eventually broken up by an American ex-pat called Michael, who is also staying at the hotel.
