Privilege (1967)

You can lead them into a better way of life, a fruitful conformity.

In September 1965, American forces in South Vietnam were authorized to use tactical nuclear weapons to fend off a Chinese incursion, prompting a Soviet invasion of West Berlin, which then escalated into full-blown nuclear war. As many feared, Britain was caught in the crossfire, and shamefully underprepared. By Christmas, martial law had been imposed to quell food riots and put down dissidents, and those citizens who weren’t being dragged in front of police firing squads had a future of radiation sickness to look forward to. At least, this was the near future posited by The War Game (1966), a pseudo-documentary that so utterly horrified the BBC brass it wasn’t shown on British television for twenty years. Even in the intervening decades – and the broadcast of Threads only a year earlier – The War Game had lost none of its power to upset.

The film’s writer and director was Peter Watkins, a unrepentantly radical force in British filmmaking, who had already reframed the 1746 Battle of Culloden as contemporary war reporting in Culloden (1965), using non-actors and vérité techniques to bring a sense of urgency to an otherwise staid genre. The success of both Culloden and The War Game brought Watkins to the attention of John Heyman,¹ who had recently co-produced the Burton Hamlet on Broadway, and who had an idea that promised to be right up Watkins’ alley. Privilege was apparently concocted during a conversation between Heyman and Terence Stamp, who suggested making a satirical film about a pop singer “who thought he was Jesus Christ.” (Heyman’s response was, “I thought they all did.”) Johnny Speight, the creator of Till Death Us Do Part,² worked up a story and novelist Norman Bogner wrote the screenplay, which was heavily revised in collaboration with Watkins. Privilege was now no longer a swipe at “the rotten world of pop” – with Watkins on board, the film would now take a bigger swing at the political establishment and the media industry that supported it, and naturally bring in the docudrama techniques Watkins had pioneered in his previous work.

Privilege is the story of Steven Shorter (Paul Jones), a hyper-popular, borderline zombified pop singer of the near future, “the most desperately loved entertainer in the world,” whose life is micromanaged to ensure peak profitability and whose act is a circus of manufactured martyrdom, based on the “sentence he once served in prison,” in which Shorter is handcuffed, beaten, and imprisoned to stoke (and manage) teeny-bopper outrage. As per our nameless, omniscient narrator (Watkins): “There is now a coalition government in Britain, which has asked all entertainment agencies to usefully divert the violence of youth, keep them happy, off the streets, and out of politics.” But the constant strain of touring and abuse has left Shorter a shell of a man, and when the Church decide to use him as their frontman for the Christian Crusade Week, kicked off by a stadium gig that has more than a whiff of the Riefenstahl about it, Shorter begins to break down and becomes a liability to the establishment.

Privilege wouldn’t exist without two particular films. The first is Lonely Boy (1962), a short cinéma vérité documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada about the phenomenon and merchandising of teen pop sensation Paul Anka, which provided Watkins not only with an insider’s look at the pop industry (something he had little to no experience of), but also a template for Privilege. Watkins apparently studied Lonely Boy in detail, even replicating some scenes and nabbing dialogue – Anka, like Shorter, doesn’t belong to himself; he belongs to the world – as a way of taking the present and moulding it into a plausible future, extrapolating Anka’s world into Shorter’s totalitarian regime. The second film is Triumph of the Will (1935), the infamous Nazi propaganda film directed by Leni Riefenstahl covering the Nuremberg rallies. Watkins isn’t shy about borrowing liberally from Riefenstahl for his own ends: the opening ticker-tape parade parallels Hitler’s arrival in Nuremberg, and the Christian Crusade stadium show is riddled with Nazi-adjacent imagery, from the burning torches to the blackshirted backing band (with Union Jack armbands, no less) who throw up Nazi salutes. Even the speaker Reverend Tate – previously only seen as a smug mute at a press conference – explodes into an unholy combination of Hitler, Oswald Mosely, and Enoch Powell, demanding that the masses give themselves fully “to God and flag” and adhere to the new tenet of “We Will Conform.”

If this all feels a bit on-the-nose, it’s primarily because a version of Watkins’ world has come to pass. A few months before the release of Privilege, Mick Jagger took place in a discussion with establishment figures about “the state of the world,” and the Rolling Stones had previously been asked by The Tailor and Cutter Magazine to wear ties onstage to boost declining sales. The late ‘60s also saw both the commercialization of the anti-war movement and the rise of the Jesus Movement in the United States and contemporary Christian music. In the United Kingdom, the Nationwide Festival of Light came to prominence in 1971 with rallies in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park, which featured performances by teen idol Cliff Richard and Eurovision winner Dana.³ And full-throated nationalism became prevalent in the Thatcherite 1980s,⁴ thanks to the Falklands War, while pop star engagement with politics fueled the “Cool Britannia” movement of the ‘90s.⁵ Indeed, Privilege’s central theme of individual freedom curtailed by media and governmental interests propped up by celebrity puppets, remains unfortunately evergreen – celebrity (and – shudder – influencer) endorsements are now a key component of political campaigns, designed to sway the most suggestible and superficial of potential voters. And it’s impossible not to choke out a gallows chuckle at the narrator’s statement that the coalition government was formed because of a “complete lack of difference between the policies of the Conservative and Labour parties.” Watkins, you wag.

Such prescience must always be punished. While Universal allowed Watkins total freedom, the studio was unfortunately tied to the Rank Organisation in the UK, a company founded by the devout Methodist and future rhyming slang J. Arthur Rank. Rank was no longer chairman of the organisation, but his legacy remained: Privilege was refused a wide release. As critic Alexander Walker noted, the film “was regarded by a film industry chief with the power to determine its exhibition, as an immoral and un-Christian picture which mocked the Church, defied authority and encouraged youth in lewd practices.” This distaste was picked up by contemporary critics in the UK, particularly those in right-wing papers, who were largely dismissive of both the film and its director, claiming that “it may well be procuring a conformity as repugnant as the one it is claiming to reject” (The Sunday Telegraph) and that “nowhere does the film admit any inherent social or cultural resistance in the human race, not even to the point of acknowledging that in show business, which is the setting of the story, teenage taste still has an odd way of favouring professionalism, artistry and certain qualities of warmth and vitality and humour.” (The Financial Times) These reviews have the whiff of critics tired of the controversy surrounding The War Game and Watkins’ insistence on what they deemed polemic, as well as a growing fatigue with the social stories coming out of the British film industry at the time.

To be fair, Privilege is not wholly successful. It is a highly experimental film, fusing Watkins’ docudrama stylings with a speculative story in a way that calls attention to itself, so it can feel like engaging with an intellectual exercise rather than a narrative.⁶ As with his previous films, Watkins packs the cast with non-actors, including pop singer Paul Jones (of Manfred Mann fame,⁷ then working on a solo career) and model Jean Shrimpton, neither of whom are particularly charismatic actors. Jones isn’t helped by being asked to play a character who is for all intents and purposes an empty vessel, and he clearly had other ambitions when he took the part. He was more interested in the exposure the film would offer than the political subtext – “It was just a way of extending the area of my fame, basically.” – and while the film did result in a bona fide number five hit with “I’ve Been a Bad, Bad Boy,” it did little to help his fledgling acting career.⁸ As for Shrimpton, she looks a bit lost playing the portrait artist and love interest, and she didn’t pursue a movie career much beyond this. But then, Shrimpton didn’t pursue much of any career after Privilege - never comfortable with the spotlight, she decamped to Cornwall to live the normal life. Good for her.

Privilege also frequently shows its low budget, with Shorter’s performances marred by a distinct lack of audience, both in his initial “Free Me” performance and the stadium scene, which apparently has an audience of around forty-nine thousand people, but which feels curiously devoid of people until they start invading the pitch. And, given Watkins’ commitment to docudrama, the narrative isn’t particularly plot-driven – Shorter starts in a state of learned helplessness and graduates to stammering, inarticulate hatred – with the narrator frequently popping in to add context. The film’s central premise of a government regime designed to keep people - especially the violent youth - happy and otherwise occupied doesn’t quite work, either, but it’s understandable given the time, when young people were seen as a force to be reckoned with, and it does prefigure the kind of paternalistic condescension that would become the norm for campaigning politicians.

That said, Privilege isn’t quite the ordeal that some critics have made it out to be: the film may be cruel, but it’s also pretty funny at times. Witness Freddie K (Victor Henry), Shorter’s musical director who comes across like a coked-up Elvis Costello and who rages through his feedback on a mawkish mother song (and the adjacent drum kit); the sweat-drenched assistant, lifting weights in a shirt and tie and casually writing off abortion costs as petty cash; a sleazy bodyguard who, as the narrator confides, is “five foot eleven inches in uplift boots”; and the modish, tonsured monks⁹ playing “Onward Christian Soldiers” to a collection of bishops, one of whom says, “Excellent! I think you’ve been influenced by Count Basie, but excellent!” For a director who is frequently dismissed as having no sense of humour – mostly because he deals with deeply serious subjects - it’s refreshing to witness actual jokes.

Ultimately, Privilege could be seen as Watkins’ most personal movie. While he doesn’t directly identify with Steven Shorter (there’s not much to identify with), he does – as Joseph A. Gomez points out in his stellar book Peter Watkins – identify with Shorter’s predicament. After Shorter tries to speak directly and honestly to the general public, he is silenced by the powers-that-be, “just to ensure that he does not again misuse his position of privilege to disturb the public peace of mind.” Watkins had faced huge pressure from the Home Office when preparing The War Game, which prompted a craven BBC to smear both the film and its director, suggesting that it was an artistic failure and that Watkins had previously employed trip wires in the making of Culloden to make his actors fall. Both suggestions were retracted – an Academy Award has a way of making an “artistic failure” seem like a triumph, and the trip wire scandal had been cooked up by Equity, disgruntled at Watkins’ use of non-actors – but Watkins was pilloried for his paranoia. It was only in 2015, some fifty years after the proposed broadcast, that Cabinet Office memos were released which confirmed the government had decided the film shouldn’t be shown, and that the BBC should act like they made the decision independently. Yay, independent, public-funded broadcasting.

It was a taste of things to come. Ever the iconoclast, Watkins would struggle to get films made and frequently butt heads with studios and broadcasters. Even Privilege – arguably the most audience-friendly of his movies – failed to garner a wide enough release, disappearing almost as quickly as it was released, and it fell into obscurity shortly after, with only occasional TV screenings until the BFI released it on DVD and Blu-ray as part of their Flipside label.¹⁰ Even that release is now tricky to get, which is a shame because, for all its faults, Privilege remains curiously prescient and a key work of one of Britain’s most uncompromising filmmakers.

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Next Up: “One of the finest films about dissent in America that’s been made in a long, long time.”

1. And John Lennon, who received a letter from Watkins that apparently inspired his 1969 “bed-in”. So not everything Watkins did was great.

2. Our American friends may know Till Death Us Do Part as the inspiration for the much tamer All in the Family.

3. The Festival of Light was the brainchild of a couple of evangelical Baptist missionaries who had returned to England from India to find it rife with “pornography and moral pollution.” Those involved included the curtain-twitching scold Mary Whitehouse (who would sue Johnny Speight after he correctly implied she was a fascist) and Malcolm Muggeridge, who is probably best known these days as being one of the old farts who “debated” Cleese and Palin about Life of Brian. Ironically, Privilege star Paul Jones would later convert to Christianity thanks to Festival of Light headliner and noted God-botherer Cliff Richard.

4. As a fun example, Not the Nine O’ Clock News’ “Baronet Oswald Ernald Mosley” makes great use of quotes from Mosley’s obituaries. Even Enoch fucking Powell (an anti-Stratfordian as well as a racist) got a wee tribute from ostensibly Labour prime minister Tony Blair when he carked it.

5. Even “Jerusalem”, England’s unofficial national anthem and a key part of the stadium gig, was covered by the likes of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Billy Bragg, and Fat Les, though the latter two have stated they covered the song to reclaim it from the right-wing nationalists.

6. Paging Mr Brecht. Watkins also uses typical documentarian distancing effects, but they represent an evolution of Brechtian techniques. As Raymond Durgnat notes, they work “in that the lucidity co-exists with, and does not need to destroy, the spectator’s emotional participation.” They aren’t as successful here (in my opinion) as they are in next week’s pick, but Privilege is very much a director finding his way in a new medium.

7. I hope I don’t need to explain who Manfred Mann were, but if you’ve heard “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” or “Pretty Flamingo”, that’s Paul Jones singing. If it’s “Mighty Quinn”, that’s Mike D’Abo. And Manfred Mann’s Earth Band - they of the “Blinded by the Light” Springsteen cover and subsequent Vacant Lot sketch - is a different line-up. Now I need a nap.

8. Shorter’s key song, “Free Me” was also covered by Patti Smith as “Privilege (Set Me Free)” on her 1978 album Easter. The cover adds quotes from Psalm 23, but ignores the film’s reprise when Shorter “repents”. If you think “Free Me” sounds familiar, it may be because it was used in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen (2019), in which Matthew McConaughey tries to do a Harold Shand in the back of a car.

9. Credited as The Runner Beans, the backing group were actually George Bean and the Runners. which would then evolve into the short-lived group Trifle.

10. Honestly one of the weirdest labels going, which contains genuine underseen classics like Bill Forsyth’s That Sinking Feeling (1979) and Requiem for a Village (1975) alongside bollocks like Expresso Bongo (1959).