Les Bicyclettes de Belsize (1968)
Hampstead, actually...
Long, long ago, when a cinema might otherwise be described as a Temple to Nicotine, a feature film might be accompanied by a second film; a documentary (plummy narrator), a short, or a low-budget feature; an excuse for ice-cream girls to flog dinky tubs (spoons rough to the tongue), from trays, during the intermission. This lasted until the early Eighties: Don’t Look Now (1973), released in a tasty double-bill with The Wicker Man (1973), Chariots of Fire (1981) paired with the delightful Scottish comedy Gregory’s Girl (1981) and so on and so on and so on. Bizarrely, somebody thought it appropriate to release Douglas Hickox’s Les Bicyclettes de Belsize (1968) alongside Twisted Nerve (1968), a controversial horror in which a mentally deranged Hywel Bennett stabs his stepfather to death with a pair of scissors.
Which is kinda weird, as Les Bicyclettes de Belsize is a sweet romantic mini-musical, a 27-minute short: The Red Balloon (1956) meets Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964)— another favourite flick— with surprisingly well-written numbers (a bit like Jesus Christ Superstar (1970): early, edgier Lloyd-Webber, before Cats— before it all went wrong) and starring Anthony May, a sort of camp mod whose voice (I’m assuming it’s him, altho’ it’s clearly dubbed?) sounds a bit like Murray Head, star of Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), a superb flick we covered in an earlier post.
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