Jez Conolly is the faculty librarian for arts, social sciences, and law at the University of Bristol. He is the author of “Beached Margin: The Role and Representation of the Seaside Resort in British Films” and a regular contributor to “Big Picture” magazine. Caroline Whelan is an independent writer and researcher. Together, they are coeditors of the “World Film Locations: Dublin” and “World Film Locations: Reykjavik”, both also published by Intellect.

World Film Locations Liverpool

By Jez Conolly, Caroline Whelan

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-026-9

Contents

Maps/Scenes,
Scenes 1-8 1897-1958, 10,
Scenes 9-16 1959-1984, 30,
Scenes 17-24 1985-1990, 50,
Scenes 25-32 1990-1997, 70,
Scenes 33-39 1998-2003, 90,
Scenes 40-46 2007-2012, 110,
Essays,
Liverpool: City of the Imagination Julia Hallam, 6,
A Case of Coup De Foudre: A Producer’s Personal Perspective on Liverpool and Film Roger Shannon, 8,
With Hope in Your Heart: Scouse Sport On-Screen David Parkinson, 28,
I Know a Place: Terence Davies’s Liverpool Wendy Everett, 48,
Play Rough: The Post-War Liverpools of the Magnet, the Clouded Yellow and Violent Playground Jacqui Miller, 68,
The Last of Liverpool: Liminal Journeys Around the Port City Les Roberts, 88,
This Lands the Place I Love and Here I’ll Stay: Merseybeat on Film Nick Riddle, 108,
Backpages,
Resources, 124,
Contributor Bios, 125,
Filmography, 128,

CHAPTER 1

LIVERPOOL

City of the Imagination

Text by JULIA HALLAM

If Liverpool didn’t exist, it would have to be invented.

Félicien De Myrbach, quoted in Of Time and the City (TERENCE DAVIES, 2008)

A city on the edge, a city more Celtic than English, a city of intense passion, of humour, music, poets and football clubs, a city disliked by Tory politicians and their ilk for its ‘bolshy’ attitude to authority and subversive determination to do things its own way. Liverpool has always figured as a place of danger in the English imagination: the epicentre of free trade and ‘gateway to Empire’ in the nineteenth century, the great wealth generated by the international slave trade also became a source of notoriety. Philanthropic gesture bequeathed the city some of the finest civic buildings in Europe, including the magnificent St George’s Hall, while astute commercial acumen commissioned Jesse Hartley to build the world’s first secure warehouse system – the Albert dock – completed in 1846. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Liverpool’s docks were some of the largest in Europe; the city was home to more than 700,000 people, many of them seafarers and Irish émigrés living in the densely crowded courts bordering the waterfront.

When the Lumière Brothers’ cameraman Jean Alexandre Louis Promio stepped off the train at Lime Street en route to Ireland in 1897, he set up his camera on St Georges Plateau and recorded the first moving images of the city in front of the huge neoclassical hall. At this time St Georges Hall defined the city’s identity internationally, just as the Liver Birds atop the Royal Liver Building and the ‘Three Graces’ skyline form the iconic epicentre of the city’s public image today. Early film-makers were captivated by the busy waterfront, capturing scenes of loading and passenger embarkation in films such as Cunard Mail Steamer Lucania Leaving for America] (Mitchell and Kenyon, 1901). A thrilling chase sequence on the Overhead Railway and across rooftops of the embarkation sheds at the end of The Clouded Yellow] (1950) captures the view from the railway before it was demolished in 1956.

Stories of crime, hardship and immorality set in bleak nineteenth-century tenements and grim terraced streets typify Liverpool’s early film history. Mitchell and Kenyon’s Arrest of Goudie (1901), claimed as one of first dramatic stagings of a real crime for the screen, is set in the terraced streets of dockland Bootle, and The Eviction (1901) is set in worker’s housing in Garston. Her Benny (1920), a classic ‘rags to riches’ tale, takes place amidst the crowded courts of Scotland Road, home to Liverpool’s vibrant Irish population. British film in the post-war period continues these traditions; Waterfront (1950), a story of a mother abandoned by her sailor husband, is a typical British social-problem film set in the now demolished Gerard Gardens. Built in the 1930s to provide modern facilities and a clean environment, in Waterfront and the well-known Violent Playground (1958) the tenements are depicted as breeding grounds of criminality and immorality, their occupants irrevocably tarnished by generations of seafaring and casual employment.

By the 1980s, Liverpool had become one of the poorest cities in Europe. The haunting beauty of its derelict dockyards and once grand civic buildings began to attract film-makers. Local writer Alan Bleasdale’s poignant series of films for British television, Boys from the Blackstuff (1981), depicts the deserted Albert docks in a sequence where former docker and political activist George, wheelchair bound, reminisces about the hopes of his youth. George epitomizes the kind of heroes found in Ken Loach’s controversial drama of dockland politics The Big Flame (1969), an ongoing concern in films such as Dockers (1999). The boost to local production from Channel 4 created a space for regional film-makers; Letter to Brehznev (1985) opens with the iconic waterfront seen by Russian sailors from an inward-bound ship heralding a romantic tale between seaman Peter and local girl Elaine who opts for life in Soviet Russia rather than staying in Thatcher’s Britain. Yet it is perhaps Terence Davies’s films of growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s that established Liverpool’s landscapes and stories in the pantheon of British cinema; his painful reveries of remembrance and loss in Distant Voices, Still Lives] (1988) and The Long Day Closes] (1992) changed the grey terraced streets of childhood into palimpsests of longing and desire. Of Time and the City] (2008) is an elegy to a city and a culture that in Davies’s mind has all but disappeared, its landscapes re-packaged by the heritage industry, its people consumed by greedy materialism and footballers’ ‘wag’ culture.

Since the 1980s the historic waterfront (declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 2004), and the rapidly re-developing wastelands around it, attracts film-makers worldwide; contemporary Liverpool has one of the most filmed landscapes in the United Kingdom, but it rarely plays itself. Apart from a handful of well-known films such as Liam (2000), The 51st State (2001) and Nowhere Boy (2009), the Victorian warehouses, Georgian terraces and neoclassical monuments are stand-ins for elsewhere. Chariots of Fire (1981) began the trend, using Liverpool’s magnificent eighteenth-century town hall interior to represent the British embassy in Paris; the grand buildings nearby become Moscow in The Hunt for Red October] (1989). In 1989 the city became the first in Britain to open a film office, a one-stop shop that takes care of all the needs of companies shooting in the city. Since 2008, the city has re-invented itself as a European Capital of Culture, attracting artists, musicians and film-makers to a city which in the words of one its well-known writers ‘just loves to talk’. It’s this ability to tell stories that helped to establish the city as the ‘Hollywood of North’; more feature films were shot in Liverpool than in any other UK city outside London during the 1990s, a trend that seems set to continue with major productions such as Sherlock Holmes (2009), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 3] (2010), Captain America: The First Avenger] (2010) and Route Irish (2010) shooting on location in and around the city.

CHAPTER 2

A CASE OF COUP DE FOUDRE

SPOTLIGHT A Producer’s Personal Perspective on Liverpool And Film]

Text by ROGER SHANNON

FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT once remarked that there was a certain incompatibility between the terms ‘Cinema’ and ‘Britain’. Clearly, he had never been to Liverpool, where ‘Liverpool and Film’ has been a long standing coup de foudre. My love of and engagement with film began as a child in the Liverpool of the 1950s and it has continued to this day, taking in along the way roles such as producer, film fund head, financier, exec producer, film festival director and, more recently, Professor of Film and Television, Edge Hill University, at its creative campus on the fringes of rural Merseyside.

Around the World in Eighty Days was the first film I ever saw; it was in 1957 at the Regal Cinema in Litherland in north Liverpool when I was five. At seventeen I saw John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy in Waterloo, Liverpool – now the wonderful community cinema the Plaza – and that got me into ‘Cinema’. I joined Merseyside Film Theatre in 1970 at the Bluecoats Arts Centre when I was eighteen and began watching international art cinema from then on. As a producer and funder at Liverpool’s Moving Image Development Agency (MIDA) I was involved with a host of films shot in Liverpool. MIDA helped around sixty films get produced in Liverpool in the mid- to late 1990s; feature films, documentaries, shorts, TV drama series, pilots, the whole shooting match. I worked hand in glove with the Liverpool Film Office, an outcome of which was the strategy: ‘The Film Office puts Liverpool in front of the camera – MIDA puts Liverpool behind the camera’. It was a strategy subsequently followed by many other cities and regions in the United Kingdom.

MIDA had a film production fund, which co-produced and co-financed a group of exciting independent UK films, all written, directed, produced and acted in by talented individuals just then appearing on the national and international film radar. Films like Butterfly Kiss (1995), the debut feature from director Michael Winterbottom and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, Under the Skin (1997), director Carine Adler and producer Kate Ogborn’s first feature, and Beautiful People (1999), Jasmin Dizdar’s first feature film. With film industry awards for these films at the Sundance, Berlin and Cannes film festivals, the role of a funding and producing agency such as MIDA was paramount in attracting increasing attention to Liverpool as a city enraptured by film.

Under the Skin – which appeared in The Guardian’s top twenty best British films 1984–2009 – featured a blistering debut performance by Samantha Morton and a wonderful cameo as the mother by the renowned Liverpool actress Rita Tushingham. This film, which won awards at numerous film festivals, including Sundance, Toronto and Edinburgh, effectively launched Samantha Morton’s feature film career. The scenes shot at Lime Street station as she confronts her sister, played by Claire Rushbrook, about their dead mother’s ring, are so combustive and combative that innocent passers-by are seen to recoil in shock at the dramatic venom Morton unleashes in her role as Iris, the sister beset by extravagant despair and headed for the oblivion of sexual recklessness. It was this instinctive and honest performance that persuaded Woody Allen to cast Morton in Sweet and Low Down for which she was Oscar-nominated.

I recall watching with astonishment, on a shipped-in Steenbeck, these blazing rushes with Kate Ogborn, the producer, and Ewa Lind, the film’s editor, as they camped in a cramped office close to the Albert Dock, and set about post-producing the film. In my experience, producing in Liverpool comes ready-made with a safety net that goes by the name of the Liverpool Film Office, the first port of call for all producers embarking on a film in the city, and a ‘one stop shop’ for all manner of film-friendly advice and guidance. The city has had a Film Office since the mid-1980s, the very first in the United Kingdom to be affiliated to the Association of Film Commissioners International. This longevity brings with it a high level of professionalism for what can be realistically achieved in filming in the city, coupled with an awareness of how to work imaginatively with producers and directors to realize their creative ambitions. In the time I’ve been associated with filming in Liverpool, Lynne Saunders has been an ever-present and rigorously resourceful figure in the process of securing locations for producers, whilst making the task of filming in the city that much easier and more enjoyable.

As Head of MIDA I was keen on investing in 1995 in a three-hour-long BBC film drama, Soul Survivors starring Ian McShane, being made by independent producer Martyn Auty. With the main twelve-week shoot set to take place in Manchester, Martyn visited Liverpool intending to shoot just a few minor scenes in the city. After only an afternoon checking out locations he decided there and then to relocate the whole drama to Liverpool. Along with McShane the cast included a wealth of American ‘faces’: Isaac ‘Shaft’ Hayes, Antonio ‘Huggy Bear’ Fargas and Taurean ‘Hill Street Blues’ Blacque, all featuring as members of the Tallahassies, the best soul and R & B outfit ever to tour prime time BBC1.

For those twelve weeks Isaac Hayes lived in Liverpool, and generated the kind of ‘hot-buttered’ buzz that only he could muster whenever he stepped out into the city’s clubs to DJ a set, or to check out the music being played by a fellow member of the crew. This he did with great regularity and generosity. To have Hayes turn up in some small club and catch your act was a rare treat for some of the younger Liverpool singers and musicians in the Soul Survivors cast. At the end of the shoot came one of my lesser known claims to fame. Hayes offered to auction his costumes from the production for charity. As master of ceremonies I auctioned off a pair of his boxer shorts and his dressing gown. The successful bidder, for a large amount of money, was Liverpool actress, Margi Clarke (starring as Connie in Soul Survivors). I hope she’s wearing them still in honour of a unique individual, who will always be a soul survivor.

CHAPTER 3

PANORAMA PRIS DU CHEMIN DE FER ÉLECTRIQUE I–IV (1897)

LOCATIONLiverpool Docks

EMERGING FROM the industrial darkness of late Victorian Liverpool, the four short extracts that form Panorama Pris du Chemin de Fer Électrique I–IV are among the first moving images ever captured of the city. By mounting his camera in one of the carriages travelling along the Liverpool Overhead Railway Jean Alexandre Louis Promio, film operator for the Lumière brothers, created what is considered by many to be the world’s first tracking shot. The filming took place a matter of months after the first showing of the Lumières’ famous 50-second film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, and while the Liverpool footage was not reported to have created a panic among its audiences as the earlier film was alleged to have done, the impression of travelling without moving and the phenomenon of motion blur must have been an arresting experience. The film grants us passage on a journey across a span of Liverpool’s commercial maritime history; starting at BrocklebankDock overlooking a timber yard and moving north to south, the footage takes in Canada Dock and the Canada Hydraulic Station Complex, the Manchester Ship Canal Great Western Railway Station at the end of North Carrier Dock, Sandon Dock full of large steam ships, going on past Bramley Moor Dock, Nelson Dock, Collingwood Dock, Stanley Dock and Clarence Graving Dock, past the gigantic Waterloo Warehouse and finishing at Princes Dock Station. The view is much changed since 1896 when the footage was shot; buildings were lost in the war, the overhead railway was closed in 1956, yet this port city endures. Jez Conolly

CHAPTER 4

ARREST OF GOUDIE (1901)

LOCATIONBootle Town Hall, Museum and Police Court, Oriel Road, Bootle

MITCHELL AND KENYON produced a number of innovative topical factual and fiction films following the founding of their film-making business in Blackburn in 1897, but their 1901 film Arrest of Goudie was something of a world’s first. It is now regarded as the earliest example of a crime reconstruction, one that was shot on the very streets where the aftermath of the real misdemeanour took place. It depicts the arrest of Thomas Goudie, an employee of the Bank of Liverpool who embezzled £170,000 to pay off his gambling debts. Looking to capitalize on the public interest in the case, the film was exhibited at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Liverpool three days after Goudie’s arrest in December of that year. It seems likely that a large part of the attraction of going to see the film was to give the local people an opportunity to watch themselves up on the screen, as Mitchell and Kenyon incorporated numerous crowd scenes in their short production. We see the key addresses involved in the case, on Berry Street and Church Street where Goudie hid or was apprehended, before eventually the criminal is seen being frogmarched off to the local police courts. Bootle Town Hall, opened in 1882 and designed in the Renaissance style by John Johnson who won the commission in a competition, served also as a courthouse and formed part of a complex of buildings erected during the late Victorian era as a declaration of Bootle’s fierce civic pride. It is now a Grade II listed building. Jez Conolly

CHAPTER 5

THE OPEN ROAD (1926)

LOCATIONThe River Mersey

THE INTERWAR YEARS in Britain saw several instances of celebratory circumnavigation of the land, courtesy of the rapid rise in motor car ownership in the 1920s, records of the country that can be characterized as concerted attempts at reaffirmation of what it meant to be British. These often took the form of rather rose-tinted picture-postcard accounts, presenting an editorialized version of the country that was frequently at odds with the experience of most people’s daily lives. The journalist H. V. Morton’s bestselling 1927 book In Search of England, charting his tour around Britain in a bull-nosed Morris, was a case in point. A few years before Morton’s book was published, the film-maker Claude Friese-Greene, son of the pioneering cinematographer William Friese-Greene, created his own record of Britain, a Lands End to John o’Groats tour filmed between 1924 and 1926 that formed the film The Open Road. Shot in Friese-Greene’s two-colour film process Biocolour, it features Liverpool briefly, starting with a vehicle-mounted shot of the trams and traffic at the Pier Head then moving to the River Mersey where we encounter the captain of R. M. S. Adriatic on the deck of his ship before cutting to a shot of a sunset over the Irish Sea. Although fleeting, these colourful glimpses of the waters of the Mersey are enough to stir a sense of the river’s importance in defining the character of the city, even if, by looking out to sea, Friese-Greene was turning a blind eye to the plight of many of the city’s inhabitants at the time. Jez Conolly

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