Where are the working class teens in cinema?

In 1969 two working-class teenage lovebirds travel to West London on a date to see the post-Oscars run of Carol Reed’s Best Picture-winning musical “Oliver!” As low on London’s food chain as Dickens’ 19th-century pickpocketing orphans — Del (Del Walker) is a 17-year-old welding apprentice who engages in small-time larceny, while Irene (Anne Gooding) is a high school student who dreams of a typing job — they are disheartened to discover they don’t have enough money for movie tickets. With few options for places to spend time together, they head to a chain burger joint. This is the rare youth-centered film where the inability to afford something isn't a tragedy or a sign of moral failure, but a typical reality for real people with real economic limits.

Barney Platts-Mills’ 1970 film “Bronco Bullfrog,” shot in London’s East End using non-actors, is a matter-of-fact observational artifact of a time and place, an almost anthropological archive of the mundanity of working-class life far removed from the attention-nabbing scene of sexual liberation and fashionable consumerism. The jocular gang of Cockney boys, often subtitled to help audiences pierce through their thick accents, awkwardly fumble toward a kind of courtship with the mini skirt-clad girls they come across. Scenes hold the silence of inarticulate flirtation while Director of Photography Adam Barker-Mill floods the screen with moody monochrome shots of East London’s smoky urban landscape. It’s more realism than romanticism, like if the wordy lovelorn Parisians of Godard’s New Wave “Masculin Féminin” had never read a lick of Marx.

“What I love about the film is that it’s universal, it’s about kids falling in love and wanting to get out of their boring life, but conversely it’s super specific within this culture of East London,” Gabriele Caroti told me. His production company Seventy Seven bought the scarcely-seen film from the British Film Institute with the hope of giving it a second life fifty years after its brief theatrical run. Currently available for streaming on Criterion Channel, Seventy Seven has taken “Bronco Bullfrog” on an arthouse tour, including at Film Forum in New York last year and an upcoming screening at Nighthawk Cinema in Brooklyn.

Caroti, who splits his time between New York City and Sharon, Conn., is the former Director of BAMcinématek. He said he was originally drawn to the film for its ties to the musical subcultures of the 1960s, specifically “reggae, the early suedehead scene, and the skinhead scene, which was all working-class kids listening to ska music. But the kids in this film aren’t really into all that. 'Bronco Bullfrog' turns out to not really be about the music, yet the movie evokes a time period that’s the opposite of a Swinging London or Carnaby Street — it’s real. I was drawn to it from a subculture perspective, but it turned out to be very different from what I expected.”

Listeners of Morrissey might be familiar with the singer’s 1980s track “Suedehead," titled after the working-class youth culture of the '60s. These boys were known for the look seen in the film — moppy bad-Beatles shag cuts, brogues and other dress shoes, along with collared shirts and wool cardigans. Fairly dressy attire for the affable delinquents who aren’t above a break-in or two. Platts Mills' boys aren’t entirely satisfied with the limitations of their lot — manual labor, little pay, and the threat of incarceration ready to slap them down — but they’re also refreshingly resigned to the smallness of their lives.

“There’s no way out, but it’s not bleak,” Caroti said.

“Bronco Bullfrog” doesn’t warn us about troubled youth the way S.E. Hilton did in her novel “The Outsiders,” later adapted for the screen by Francis Ford Coppola, or attempt to frighten the world with lurid authenticity like Larry Clark and Harmony Korine’s 1995 film “Kids.” The suedeheads don’t have any run-ins with the recognizable cultural figures of the decade like the young fame-chasers in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza” and they don’t leave town for a new life at college, like at the end of Greta Gerwig’s “Ladybird.” Much of the character’s prospects in life remain the same by the end of the film, and there's a dignity in their understanding that this is the only life they’ll know — a far cry from Oliver Twist’s ascension to the comforts of the gentry.

Twenty-five years old when he directed “Bronco Bullfrog,” Barney Platts-Mills meant to create something accessible, reflecting the Cockney culture of London as it really was. These days, egalitarianism in the entertainment field is hotly debated online — populism vs elitism — enough for the Oscars to toy with a “Popular Film” category, suggesting there was a stark divide between the films deemed artistically worthy of praise and the films people actually went to see. There is some irony that the studio films made for hundreds of millions of dollars would be seen as belonging to "the people," while arthouse cinema, with little financial backing, is meant for the elite. Studio blockbusters hold appeal as escapist fantasies, but as the levels of income inequality grow to extraordinary heights and the middle class continues to decline, where are the stories of normal life among the working class?

“Bronco Bullfrog” will screen on Saturday, Jan. 7, with an introduction by writer and critic Sasha Frere-Jones at The Moviehouse in Millerton, N.Y.

Film still courtesy of Seventy Seven

Film still courtesy of Seventy Seven

Poster Courtesy of MovieStillsDB

  

Film still courtesy of Seventy Seven