Michael Winner.

The System : Reed and David Hemmings (standing) 

At his zenith, Michael Winner upset one of the mix technicians, who turned round and said “Michael, why are you such a shit?” Winner looked back and offered “In fifty years people will think of me as a nice guy, George - and no one will remember who you were.”

Well, now Michael Winner has died and he is being recalled with affection and the only reason we remember George is that he once sassed Michael Winner.

It’s hard to make the connection between the flamboyant Young Turk of British movies and the TV food critic personality, who published an autobiography with a picture of himself with the Queen at his National Police Memorial.

Winner’s path was not an unfamiliar one. He came from Jewish wealth and privilege (Michael Apted claimed to be the first British working class movie director - which is rough on Ken Hughes, who started as re-wind boy at Harrow Road Prince of Wales) and having an MA, he used that background to by-pass the usual process of clambering up through the ranks of TV or establishing as a celebrity writer, actor or Theater personality.  He put family money into productions if they let him direct and plowed through awful shorts, quota crime features, pop movies, a nudist flick and a Mikado fresh out of copyright. He was the youngest director in British movies.

Michael Winner.

However something happened with Michael Winner. Starting with West 11, his films connected. The Carry Ons and Naval Sagas were already faltering but Winner’s films were more involving than the new working class realist cinema the critics were celebrating. With The System, where Winner first fielded Hammer horror star Oliver Reed, writer Peter Draper and cameraman Nicholas Roeg, he was offering a picture of a Britain not divided by class or crippled by memories of a faded empire but more fundamentally dysfunctional. In his films, Reed might organise the seduction of Brighton tourist crumpet, steal the Crown Jewels or take to his Ad Agency desk with an ax, like the one Michael Gothard uses in Herostratus,  but he will be engulfed by self-loathing by the ending. The military of his You Must Be Joking or the Oxford Dons of  Winner’s masterpiece I’ll Never Forget Whats’is Name are treated with equal contempt. For these films and this statement to come out of the Britain of the 1960s was arresting.

Winner’s similarly disenchanted The Games curiously was one of the English trio that sparked the rise of Australian filming - along with Walkabout and Wake in Fright.

For the main part, he didn’t make it into the NFT, the Classic Repetory Cinemas or Hampstead Everyman, though London’s Films and Filming, where Winner had written and whose editor was alleged to be on a payback to include his name in every issue, did take him with a deserved seriousness. It was only in the ‘States that his work was noted.

Came 1969 and the British film industry went into arrest and its established talent headed for Hollywood or washed about in dodgy Euro Trash movies.

However Michael Winner proved the most adaptable of the British exports, to the dismay of his admirers watching Stone Killers or The Sentinel. The director wasn’t worried, with an association with the Go Go boys at Globus, or Burt Lancaster and Charles Bronson to keep him busy. Challenged on his new profile, he commented that he was genuinely disturbed that British film, which accounted for much of his best work, had disintegrated.

In this period he made one of the most alarming films of all time, his Bronson thriller  Death Wish, spun off the subway vigilante incident.

 There was more to come in movies - Lancaster and Alain Delon together, Mitchum as Philip Marlowe, Anthony Hopkins in Alan Aykbourn - to add to his work with Orson Welles and Marlon Brando - but this was muted for the film maker who had come closest to being a Shakespearean fool telling us about a society where  “Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.”

The Michael Winner who boasted about blowing up cars in Piccadilly circus and commissioned a giant hoarding that said “Michael Winner hates self publicity” was more endearing and more fun than the jolly TV celebrity of his last years. 

Whether, as Michael Caine suggested, there was a sensitive artist hidden behind the bombast, there was certainly a unique talent.

Barrie Pattison 2013