Lunch Hour

Director James Hill's self-contained drama Lunch Hour (1962), stars Shirley Anne Field and Robert Stephens as a couple beginning an affair. Shirley Anne Field (Beat Girl, Peeping Tom, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Entertainer) gives a highly memorable, fierce performance as a young artist/designer on the brink of an affair with an amiable yet weak-willed married male executive (Robert Stephens) at the company where she works. The short (the picture is only 63 minutes long), black and white film, based on the play by John Mortimer, surprisingly supports the aspirations for autonomy - freedom from an unsuitable male companion, domestic drudgery and other people's visions of how she should live/behave - harboured by Shirley Anne Field's nameless Girl. It was perhaps John Mortimer's guilt over his turbulent relationship with his first wife, author Penelope, a marriage shattered by his numerous adulteries and her writer's block, that shaped such a 'feminist' work, With a tightly focused narrative telling the story of an illicit lunch-hour assignation in 'real-time', this is an elegant and highly charged story of deception, seething anxiety and sexual discord. On just the evidence of Lunch Hour alone, the wonderful Shirley Anne Field should have definitely enjoyed an even more successful career than the one she actually attained. The great British poet Philip Larkin famously wrote, "sexual intercourse began in 1963…. Between the end of the Chatterley ban and The Beatles first LP", but in Hill's 1962 film, sharply influenced by the French New Wave, we see the early stirring of female discontent and rebellion that shaped the course of the 'sexual revolution' during that decade and beyond.

Also included on the disc are director James Hill's charming colour British Petroleum shorts, which were first shown in cinemas, then with the advent of colour television in the UK in the late 1960s, enjoyed a second life as trade test colour films on TV. These BP pictures include Skyhook, about a helicopter and its crew working in the harsh jungle of Papua New Guinea searching for oil and the 1959 Oscar-winning short Giuseppina, about a young Italian girl who observes various characters who pass her father's petrol station. Giuseppina was the last trade test colour film to be broadcast in August 1973. Much-loved by viewers, these vibrant, likeable films from a bygone age have found appreciation amongst aficionados of so-called 'Trade Test Transmissions', and have never been previously released in any format.