Sometimes, I watch films that aren't illegally uploaded onto YouTube. One of my recent favourites is Franco Rosso's Babylon (1980), an empathetic and affecting portrait of the post-Windrush generation in the early 80s. It follows a group of young Black South Londoners as they prepare for a reggae dub soundclash. They work 9-5s, find killer dubs to play, shoot the shit, show up to a party, revel in the effects of good weed and heavy bass. As you're hanging out with them, British society's intrinsic, comfortable racism becomes more prominent, a simmer turning to a boil. We're in the era of sus laws (which was seemingly folded into modern Section 60 orders), an emergent National Front, Thatcherism. The film has smokey cinematography, naturalistic performances, a sense of shell-shocked catharsis and dub, dub, dub. It was buried on release and given an X rating from the BBFC, making listening to the grievances of a community as seedy as watching pornography in public.
Rosso and Martin Stellman wrote the screenplay. Stellman had previously kept his finger on the pulse of British musical movements, having written mods'n'greasers classic Quadrophenia (1979), so his subcultural hall-of-fame status is secure. Beyond those two films, he has an intriguing career as a screenwriter and director: Denzel Washington vehicle For Queen and Country (1988), Idris Elba's directorial debut Yardie (2018), late-period Sydney Pollack joint The Interpreter (2005). But digging through the murky fan-uploaded efforts on YT, I came across 1986's Defence of the Realm, a political thriller that boasts a Stellman screenplay. The only available alternative to watch this film is to pay £7.99 for a single rental on Prime and trust me; you can rent Babylon eight times for that amount instead.
To be candid, Defence operates at the quality level I initially expected for this newsletter's films, well before Johnnie To's The Mission scrambled my brain. It is a British attempt to emulate American paranoiac politico-thrillers of the Seventies, but moves and feels more like mid-tier ITV drama than, say, Three Days of the Condor (1975). For a thriller, it's not particularly thrilling. For a film about journalism, it doesn't bring anything new to the cliches of the cinematic newsroom (smoke-filled rooms, tac-tac-tac typewriter noise, off-screen notifications about missed calls). As a newspaper journalist looking into a government cover-up, Gabriel Byrne hits the marks: slimy at first, then loosening his tie and growing some stubble to show a descent into THEY KNEW!!! paranoia. Defence of the Realm is the type of English-language film you'd expect to float about on YouTube for years without a copyright claim. It's okay.
And yet! (WARNING: Indulge me, as I will spoil this film you've only just heard about and that I've barely recommended.) In the film, a piece on a closely-avoided nuclear catastrophe is pulled from publication, as to protect the outside interests of a proprietor of the newspaper. Stellman focuses on the ways that journalistic intent conflicts with stakeholder interests, a common issue in Thatcher-era journalism. But the film finds an unexplored racial aspect: Byrne's it-goes-all-the-way-to-the-top begins with the state-sanctioned murder of a young Black man.
At the start of the film, the young man (played by Steven Woodcock, alum of British high-school drama Grange Hill) escapes a youth detention centre with a friend and scrambles over a fence. The press reports that his body was found thirty-six hours later and that's that. At the film's climax, it's revealed the fence protected a secret nuclear base in Norfolk, and that the young man ran across a plane with nuclear weapons, nearly causing a disaster unknown to Britain. The British government essentially murders this young Black man and covers it up —along with the occurrence of the nuclear near-miss.
Defence's focus is never really on race — it's far more interested in the demonisation of the British left-wing and cynicism of ruling forces. (“There’s a lot wrong with this country, but it’s not Bulgaria," a newspaper editor scoffs at one point.) Woodcock is the only prominent actor of colour that appears in the film, but this fact never truly impacts the film. But, I came to Defence through Stellman, a white man who portrayed a post-Windrush generation with empathy and respect in Babylon with no real false notes. Upon reading more about Stellman's career, it appears he had to drastically rewrite the script, which culminated with tanks on the streets of London rather than an angry roar at endemic structural racism. Most likely, he didn't intend for antiblackness to have a role in Defence, and director David Drury feels more interested in acting through fears of the deep state. But familiarity with Stellman's past work made the film far darker for me, seeing as it places an antiblackness at the core of the British state's cover-up, and the fact this death remains brushed-off until further investigation is tragic. Perhaps there is, was, or could be, a film that explores that further.
Anyway, Babylon is a masterpiece. Go watch the fucking thing.
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