John Orr would have been pleased with this book (his first to deal exclusively with British cinema), which is nicely presented despite a few typos (notably on 131) and a few slips (Robin Maugham’s Escape from the Shadows [1972] becomes Among the Shadows on the following page [123–24]), and fulsomely endorsed by Charles Barr and Ian Christie. It is a slim volume (only 195 pages), with an even slimmer bibliography and no footnotes, but it is nonetheless an important and significant book—the first comprehensive study of British commercial cinema as art cinema. Useful though this is, it poses the danger of reverting to the Roger Manvell era of film appreciation when the great bulk of British cinema was dismissed as beneath regard and only a tiny sample of films considered worthy of critical exegesis. Indeed, Orr is extremely selective in what he thinks worthy of consideration. The 1930s are dismissed as a big sleep when the modernist advances of late silent cinema are forgotten. The 1950s are politely ignored: only Carol Reed’s The Man Between (1953) is deemed worthy of attention and even Joseph Losey’s Time without Pity (1957) is condemned as clichéd and overwrought. The British New Wave films are dismissed on the say-so of Peter Wollen. The 1970s are included only because of the presence of Kubrick and Skolimowski, and the 1980s films backed by Channel 4 are written off as “televisual,” a description that fits oddly with Mike Radford’s Another Time, Another Place (1983), Bill Dryden’s Ill Fares the Land (1983), and Ian Sellars’s Venus Pete (1989), to take but three examples.

Orr’s proclaimed mentor is not Manvell but Raymond Durgnat, whose A Mirror for England (1971) opened up so many avenues for the study of British cinema at a time when it was deeply unfashionable to take even Powell and Pressburger seriously. Like Durgnat, Orr delights in complexity and contradiction. Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975), for example, is a love story between a man with someone else’s name and a woman with no name, and it may not be a love story at all, but a honey trap setting up an assassination. Or it may not. Or it may be a film about love and betrayal. It may well be the existential love affair of a couple on the run it appears to be, and it may be that paranoid viewers—like the author—are paranoid in thinking otherwise. There is no closure and no answer. The film can be viewed either way with perfect consistency (136).

Like Durgnat Orr makes bold comparisons between unlikely films—The Silence (1963) with The Servant (1963), Point Blank (1967) with Angel (1982), The Red Shoes (1948) with Control (2004), A Matter of Life and Death (1946) with Dead of Night (1945), The Innocents (1961) with Repulsion (1965) and Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) with The Red Desert (1964) and The Searchers (1956). Not all of these bear fruit but enough do to make the attempt worthwhile.

But whereas Durgnat ranges wide and refuses to dismiss flawed films from consideration, Orr narrows down to a score or so directors and a partial selection of their films. His grand idea is to divide his auteurs into modernists and romantics, though he acknowledges that the romantics (Powell, Lean, Reed, Hitchcock) have modernist tendencies and the modernists (Losey, Antonioni, Preminger, Polanski, Kubrick) have occasional lurches into romanticism. He completes his arc by claiming that the modernists are recapturing an avant-garde leap forward a the end of the 1920s, when Grierson’s Drifters (1929), Asquith’s A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), Dupont’s Piccadilly (1929), and Hitchcock’s The Manxman (1929), Blackmail (1929), and Number 17 (1932) offered the promise of artistic significance only to have it smothered by the commercial demands of the talking picture. (It doesn’t seem to worry Orr that none of his modernists are British.) The modernism of the 1960s is eventually capped by a new wave of neoromantics (Boorman/Russell/Roeg/Jarman). This is not entirely convincing, but at least it offers a fresh alternative to the realism/melodrama and quality/popular divides in which British cinema is generally discussed.

Much of Orr’s analysis is persuasive and articulate. His discussion of Bill Douglas’s Scottish trilogy almost tempts one to go back and reconsider films that might be considered marginal. He also provides a new vocabulary for discussing British films. The “fugitive film” he inherits from Durgnat, but Orr adds “romantic realism,” “the trauma film,” and “the parallax view.” Unfortunately these are more like catch-alls for the films he wants to discuss rather than coherent categories. The “parallax view,” the defining feature of his 1960s modernist selection, is the most promising: “a kind of bipolar vision converging on the same image which allows the viewer to ‘see’ a film equally in one way than in another that seems diametrically opposed” (118). In genuinely ambiguous films like The Passenger this proves a productive approach, but in others (Point Blank, Blowup [1966]), where the alternative way of looking at the film boils down to “it was all a dream,” Orr’s analysis tends to dribble away into puerility.

Paradoxically, this looks like a young man’s book, full of bold assertions and confidently proposed judgements but constrained by a narrow knowledge of the field. Even within his confined parameters, one would have expected Orr to show some knowledge of films beyond the usual suspects (Hamer’s The Long Memory [1952], Clayton’s The Pumpkin Eater [1964]) and directors who have uncertain, though legitimate claims as auteurs (Tony Richardson with Mademoiselle [1966] and The Charge of the Light Brigade [1968], Richard Lester with Petulia [1968] and The Bed-Sitting Room [1969]).

Sadly, John Orr died in September 2010 at the age of 67. Romantics and Modernists was his eighteenth book. If this review is critique rather than eulogy it is because there is a political issue over whether the study of British cinema should concentrate on a canon of approved texts or whether it should explore the wider reaches of popular cinema. But this is still a book well worth reading.