Bronco Bullfrog
📺🏍️Now streaming on The Criterion Channel!🏍️ 📺
“Before Quadrophenia, before The Jam, before the Sex Pistols,
there was Bronco Bullfrog.” —Sasha Frere-Jones, Observer
The debut film by “one of the forgotten heroes of British cinema” (Matthew Sweet, BBC Radio 4), Barney Platts-Mills’ Bronco Bullfrog is “remarkable” (Mollie Panter-Downes, The New Yorker), a “breathtaking time capsule” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian), and a “revelation” (Kieron Corless, Sight & Sound).
Seventeen year old Del, with no money and nowhere to go, breaks into train cars with his cool, fresh out of borstal (reform school) pal Bronco Bullfrog. But one day he meets the lovely Irene, and despite an earful from his dad (and her mum), the two young lovers run away together… but to where?
Shot in London’s East End in 1969, cast with Doc Marten wearing “suedehead” locals, and set to a dynamic soundtrack by early 70s art rock band Audience, Bronco Bullfrog has been compared to the work of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, but with a punk rock spirit. After a minuscule American release following its Edinburgh and Cannes premieres, this “lost gem” (Dave Calhoun, Time Out) returns over 50 years later as a cult landmark of two teens in love, in black and white and cockney—with subtitles.
Written and Directed by Barney Platts-Mills
Photographed by Adam Barker-Mill
Produced by Andrew St. John
Edited by Jonathan Gili
Music by Audience (Howard Werth, Tony Connor, Keith Gemmell, & Trevor Williams)
Starring Del Walker, Anne Gooding, Sam Shepherd, Roy Haywood, Chris Shepherd, Geoff Wincott, Freda Shepherd, Stuart Stones, and Dick Philpott
United Kingdom • 1970
In English with subtitles
87 minutes • Black & White • 1.33:1
“A RAW and SENSITIVE DRAMA about working-class London teens facing formidable walls of social exclusion… The on-location filming depicts their narrow and perilous world with a documentary-like authority, and the cast of nonprofessional actors invest the milieu with their SHAMBLING ENERGY and POIGNANT PRESENCE.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“AN AUSPICIOUS FIRST FEATURE… a British equivalent of Italian neo-realism: A cast of nonactors recruited from the streets of London’s depressed East End enact a story that might have been their own… UNPRETENTIOUSLY ATMOSPHERIC.”
—J. Hoberman, The New York Times
“A nonchalant working-class drama with unpolished acting and IMMENSE HEART.” —Graham Fuller, Air Mail
“SMASHING... Touching and piercing. A stirring and true-spirited romantic film.”
—Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker
“A BREATHTAKING TIME CAPSULE. There is freshness and life and as a historical record it’s pure gold.” —Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“Crude and defiant… Full of such angry energy… There is hardly a moment in Bronco Bullfrog that does not display A VIGOROUS, VERY REAL TALENT.”
—Jay Cocks, TIME
“TENDER, POETIC, and IMMENSELY FUNNY... You would be foolish to miss it.”
—Tom Milne, The Observer
“A REMARKABLE little film… So HONEST that watching it feels like looking straight through the windows of the new Council Estate flats… TOUCHING and FUNNY… The film is really about the tragedy of being unable to communicate the most aching emotions… The acting of these unknown people is EXTRAORDINARY.”
—Mollie Panter-Downes, The New Yorker
“A REVELATION... Easily one of the greatest and most insightful films ever made about the British working class… It makes you wonder why someone as talented as its director Barney Platts-Mills never became a household name alongside the likes of Loach and Leigh.”
—Kieron Corless, Sight & Sound
“A VERY, VERY GOOD FILM INDEED, not just promising but a promise fulfilled… It has a very personal kind of poetic quality that is so unusual in British films.”
—Lindsay Anderson
“IT SENDS YOUR HEART LEAPING.” —Alexander Walker, London Evening Standard
“A CLASSIC OF ITS KIND… The performances are rough-and ready, a fascinating timepiece.” —Sukhdev Sandhu, The Telegraph
“ONE OF THE MOST RADICAL PIECES OF BRITISH CINEMA.”
—Angelos Koutsourakis, Pop Matters
“A MUST-SEE.” —Michael McNulty, The London Economic
“LOVELY… If you were to take the tough urban environment that constitutes the imaginary world of A Clockwork Orange and put real and rather decent people into it, you might come up with the preconditions for Barney Platts-Mills’s Bronco Bullfrog…You are witnessing a love story, free from the rhetoric of love or love stories.” —Roger Greenspun, The New York Times
“A FORGOTTEN TIME PIECE, A REBEL IN EXILE. Few films have highlighted the class war at the heart of British cinema (and, by implication, the nation as a whole) so pointedly as Bronco Bullfrog… A BRISK, BRACING, SLICE-OF-LIFE DRAMA, a casual portrait of late-60s 'suedeheads' kicking their heels and dreaming of escape. The directing is rough and ready; the performances are a little rude and unschooled. In the end, of course, that's all part of the appeal… To watch it now is to catch a glimpse of AN ALTERNATIVE STRAIN OF BRITISH CINEMA… Part of what makes Bronco Bullfrog so captivating is the way IT CATCHES A MOMENT IN TIME.”
—Xan Brooks, The Guardian
“A LOST GEM… The crime is petty; the petting is coy… The locations are as real as the behavior; and the feeling is of youngsters acting out their lives."
—Dave Calhoun, Time Out
“Buoyant and funny… there’s a lovely naturalism to the chat and romance… Most strikingly, and unlike other better-known realist films of the time, there’s nothing precious about its attitude to the working class: the spirit of its actors runs right through it.”
—Time Out (London)
World Premiere 1970 Edinburgh International Film Festival
International Premiere 1971 Semaine de la critique Cannes
Winner Screenwriters Guild Award—Best Original Screenplay