Noo! The previous Owen short was awful!

Yay! Siân Phillips!

The previous Half Hour Stories have been immaculate, picture and sound wise. This isn’t — it looks like it’s been sourced from a video tape? Which is a shame, because it looks like the most interesting one so far…

It’s a lot of fun watching Siân Phillips here, but the script is beyond risible.

There’s a common theme going through several of these shorts (but not the first two) — stunning women being involved with men that have no charms whatsoever. It’s awful casting. If the scripts were good, that’d help, but this is horrible. It’s so bad that I wonder whether I rated the previous shorts too highly. Perhaps they were all as bad as this really?

Thief. Alan Clarke. 1968. ⚀

This guy has a curiously tiny mouth.

This short doesn’t really explain why a knock-out like Frances White would be so desperate to hang on to Ronald Fraser? He’s presented as having no redeeming qualities what so ever.

This is pretty weak. It’s basically a O. Henry story — but ambiguously! — so that it can be All Serious And Stuff.

It’s an elevator pitch padded out to 25 minutes.

Still, the performances are good. It’s better than the last one, but it’s still not actually worth watching.

The Fifthy-Seventh Saturday. Alan Clarke. 1968. ⚁

This is risibly awful. This is like one of those things people point to as being embarrassing TV dramas. Only shorter.

The script is awful beyond belief.

The only redeeming thing here is the actors, who really try to make this happen. They don’t succeed, but they sure work hard.

Stella. Alan Clarke. 1967. ⚁