The White Bus
Directed byLindsay Anderson
Screenplay byShelagh Delaney
Based ona short story by Shelagh Delaney
Produced byLindsay Anderson
StarringPatricia Healey
CinematographyMiroslav Ondříček
Edited byKevin Brownlow
Music byMisha Donat
Production
companies
Woodfall Film Productions
Holly Productions
Distributed byUnited Artists
Release date
  • December 1967 (1967-12) (UK)
Running time
46 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish

The White Bus is a 1967 British short drama film directed by Lindsay Anderson. The screenplay was jointly adapted[1] with Shelagh Delaney from a short story in her collection Sweetly Sings the Donkey (1963).[2] The White Bus was also the film debut of Anthony Hopkins.[3]

Plot

The main character, only referred to as 'The Girl' (Patricia Healey) leaves London, goes north on a train full of football fans and takes a trip in a white double-decker bus around an unnamed city she is visiting (although clearly based on Manchester, near Delaney’s hometown of Salford). The Mayor (Arthur Lowe), a local businessman, and the council's ceremonial macebearer (John Sharp) happen also to be taking the trip while they show the city to visiting foreigners.

Cast

Production history

The film was originally commissioned by producer Oscar Lewenstein, then a director of Woodfall, as one third of an anthology feature entitled Red, White and Zero, with the other sections supplied by Anderson's Free Cinema collaborators Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz[4] from the other short stories by Shelagh Delaney.

The "first real day's shooting" was on 19 October 1965, and took about a month to complete.[5]

The two other planned sections of the film developed into Richardson's Red and Blue and — Reisz having dropped out — Peter Brook's Ride of the Valkyrie, neither of which are related to Delaney's work. Of these, only The White Bus received a theatrical release in the UK.[6]

Notes

  1. Hedling, E: "Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker", Cassell, 1998, p.62
  2. Shelagh Delaney "Sweetly Sings the Donkey", New York: GP Putnam, 1963; London: Methuen, 1964
  3. "Sir Anthony Hopkins – Welsh actor".
  4. Lindsay Anderson, Paul Ryan (ed) "Never Apologise: The Collected Writings", Plexus, 2004, p.105
  5. Sutton, p.140-41
  6. Sutton, p.146
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