Film

Bronco Bulldog: A 1960s London without hippies and the Kings Road

Christopher Brocklebank | Saturday 3 July, 2010 13:22

For those given to the act of thinking, there’s forever a sense of doubt attached to ‘established’ social history—a nagging feeling that the more interesting aspects of an era may be buried beneath a ton of cultural dogma. Bronco Bullfrog, shot on location in the East End in 1969, is a smashing, monochromatic example of such marginalia—the surly, underage sibling of Blowup and Performance, as insouciant and attitudinal as the latter two are self-conscious.

The ‘actors’ were a bunch of Stratford and West Ham kids coaxed off the streets by Joan Littlewood’s theatre company and the film’s plot is as spartan as the (largely) improvised dialogue: Seventeen-year-old half-hearted hooligan Del meets 15-year-old Irene. His dad and her mum disapprove (her dad’s in the clink) and so the pair take their relationship to the streets with all the ennui and frustration of a million teen couples before and since. Society at large offers them no space. It merely insists they sit their frustration out, which they do in Wimpy bars, derelict prefabs and late night strip-lit cafés with PG-Tips-spattered Formica table tops. They hook up with the titular character, who’s fresh out of Borstal. Ironically, the no-hoper status this should immediately consign him to is initially scotched by the fact he’s the only kid in E15 who’s captain of his own ship.

And yet, the film’s sense of social realism is such that Bronco, Del and Irene gradually appear to have no hope of escaping the gravitational pull of their background. When asked why he bothered coming back to the two-decade-old bombsites of Stratford when he could have gone up the “other end,” Bronco replies that he “don’t know anyone there.” The King’s Road, that attention-seeking poseur’s promenade that holds every phoney sixties memory in its strangulating grip, was a mere Circle Line ride away, but might as well have been one of Saturn’s moons. The characters’ lack of zeal in all their acts – sex, thieving, fighting, drinking – suggest a bleak sense of fatalism: that their lot may be Their Lot.

Bronco Bullfrog is sharper than any frenetic, kinetic contemporary ‘youth’ movie owing to what it leaves out. The minimalist dialogue would likely make a modern young audience uncomfortable (and would freak an American one out). Ten minutes of film—which would now be filled with ‘street’ babble —here features 30 seconds of awkward, parsimonious teen dialogue (‘Wanna go out with me tomorrow night?’ ‘OK’ ‘Alright, see ya’), which briefly make it a comedy of embarrassment.

I’ve heard this film described as a monument to ‘Mod’ more than a few times. This cultural narcolepsy (‘If it’s the sixties and it’s not hippies—it must be Mods!’) is best paid no mind. While there’s no conscious sense of subcultural identity or tribalism evident among the kids of Bronco Bullfrog, this lot are the end product of Hard Mods, i.e. suedeheads: those whom means were as slender as their silhouettes and for who petrol-blue Italian mohair suits were out, but Sta-prest, button-down shirts and steel-capped leather boots were in. Unlike the loon-panted, cravat-sporting scions of SW3, they do not look in any way ridiculous to modern eyes (the doe-eyed, tumble-haired Irene looks unnervingly contemporary). It’s thus a shame that the (specially recorded) soundtrack doesn’t reflect the subculture in question. Surely skanking bluebeat and ska would have trumped the longhaired, bass-heavy sounds of The Audience, given the proto-Skin nature of the protagonists.

The unbilled character here is London. Bronco Bullfrog is a pin-sharp, hymn of authenticity to a vanished section of the capital now more host to the ubiquitous than the unique. There are glimpses of Hackney Speedway (now buried beneath the rising Olympic stadium), an unpedestrianised Leicester Square in a trip ‘up west’, freshly-set concrete flyovers over which Del drives Irene, pillion-style and even a working dock, probably the last of its kind. In the distance, Balfron Tower is visible, a symbol, along with the high-rise Irene lives in with her mother, of an anticipated future that never arrived.

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