Horace Ové’s ground-breaking drama, acclaimed as the first feature-length film to be made in the UK by a black British director, gets the full restoration treatment in this handsome Blu-ray release by the BFI. Ové, who came from Trinidad, had been making documentaries for a decade when he approached the BFI in 1975 with a script he had co-written with the Caribbean novelist Sam Selvon (author of The Lonely Londoners).
Pressure follows Tony, fresh out of school and negotiating the streets of north Kensington, Ladbroke Grove and Portobello, pre-gentrification. His father runs a cornershop and he lives in the flat above it, His older brother Colin and his parents came from the West Indies to England as part of the Windrush generation. Tony, born in London, struggles to find his place in the adult world. He's turned down for clerical jobs by white middle-managers, despite his good qualifications, because of the colour of his skin, Tony is not keen to conform to his parents’ church-going self-effacement and isn’t initially convinced by his older brother Colin’s proselytizing for the Black Power movement. Tony’s shoplifting friends get into trouble with the police while a white girlfriend can’t bring him back to her room without her racist landlady hurling abuse.
Horace Ové had 10 years of documentary-filmmaking under his belt, including films about the novelist James Baldwin and the history of carnival in Trinidad, when he made Pressure and some of the best sequences in this pioneering feature are those shot in the neo-realist manner on the streets of West London. There’s a sense of guerilla filmmaking, with the central actors playing their parts, but the locals around them not always knowing that a feature is being shot. The dance hall and blues parties are beautifully filmed with a reggae soundtrack and are an obvious influence on Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock decades later.
Tony, played with a sweetness and diffidence by Herbert Norville, tries to negotiate his path into adulthood He's wholly engaging onscreen as he deals with the siren call of his petty-thieving friends or the obtuse racism of the white employers who turn him down for work. The long dialogue scenes around the kitchen table or in meeting hall rallies where Colin (Oscar James pictured below, left, with Norville) and Sister Sharon (Sheila Scott Wilkinson) argue for better education and equal rights for black Britons are somewhat weakened by the variable acting skills of other cast members and the somewhat didactic script.
Pressure wasn’t released until 1978, mired by the reluctance of the BFI and cinema exhibitors to show a film that featured police brutality against black Londoners in the wake of the Notting Hill riot of 1976. The film’s reputation has grown over the decades and it's now acclaimed as a foundational work in black British culture with Ové being knighted in 2022 for his services to media. His trailblazing documentary photography has been featured in exhibitions at the Tate and NPG while his TV dramas Play for Today’s A Hole in Babylon, Empire Road and The Orchard House for C4 also broke barriers.
Pressure was restored in 4k by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation in 2023 and given a short theatrical tour that year. Sadly, Ové himself had died a few weeks earlier, but his filmmaker/artist son Zak Ové and other family members have been involved in the compilation of this definitive BFI Blu-ray edition. As well as restoring the original film's images and sound to pristine condition, there’s a new audio commentary by Norville, the lead actor, and producer Robert Buckler. Other valuable extras include the short documentary portrait Ové made of James Baldwin in 1969, recordings of the director talking about the making of Pressure over the years, and two short films from the 1960s, Ten Bob in Winter and Jemima & Johnny that captured the experience of black people coming to England from the West Indies.
