Rent No Love for Johnnie (1961)

Can I Have a Word? - No Love for Johnnie review by CH

A week is ninety minutes in politics. The thought comes to mind when thinking of Wilfred Fienburgh MP. What course would his life have taken? On the left of the Labour Party, he rose through adversity and world war but died in 1958 when his motor-car hit a lamp-post in London. He left behind a novel, No Love for Johnnie. That posthumous publication was soon followed by a swift-moving film (1960) - and one can reasonably speculate that these inspired all the incarnations of Michael Dobbs's House of Cards.

Not to give away too much (writing and politics share something with the bridge or, better, the chess table). Although, in reality, that was the era of Macmillan's “you've never had it so good”, the film (directed by Ralph Thomas and co-written by Mordecai Richler) finds an alternative reality in which Labour is in charge between that end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP. The focus is upon an MP from the North (Peter Finch, on screen almost all of the time). He has to temper what one might call his New Labour ambitions with his constituents' (or, at any rate, the local Party's) views - which are, shall we say, of a Corbynite persuasion.

Nothing changes, all that much. Even as I write this, there are doubtless voices which hush on the Terrace as somebody goes by who is not part of an intra-Party plot being hatched beside that eternal river.

And, of course, there is always the human factor to undermine the design of politics by numbers. In this case, Finch's marriage has staled, if it ever had brio; he is bruised, vulnerable to passing fancy (played both by the wonderfully-named Mary Peach, still with us, and Billie Whitelaw who, alas, is not). All of which appears to anticipate those events which, a couple of years later, brought down a Conservative government (“well, he would say that, wouldn't he?”).

As for this film itself, it moves at a pace, with a cast which comprises so many of those whom politicians would call “a dream team” - from Mervyn Johns to Mona

Washbourne by way of Dennis Price as an acerbic, low-camp photographer who, wise to model Miss Peach's ad hoc political involvement, tells her to pretend that the saucepan handle in her grasp “is the whole Front Bench”. How did that get past the Censor?

Here is a film whose ensemble playing is something of which politicians themselves can only dream. Although Peter Finch is to the fore with a bravura performance – which makes something charming of the charmless -, this is a film in which everybody, from a stationmaster to a Commons clerk, has a well-deployed line or two. Democracy in action.

Not to mention a party in a basement flat, that disc-driven staple of early-Sixties films. In this case, a few seconds find Oliver Reed contending with a cardboard box over his head. Quite why is not clear. Could he have inspired Lord Buckethead?

Another puzzle is that it was filmed in cinemascope, for the bulk of it – from bed to bar and back again – is a matter of smoke-filled interiors. Still, the eyes adjust to the shehanigans.

High time the novel were re-issued.

And would that there had been seat-belts and air-bags in 1958.