| The Pleasure Garden | |
| Director: | James Broughton |
| Starring: | Hattie Jacques Lindsay Anderson John Le Mesurier |
| Music: | Stanley Bate |
| Studio: | Farallone Films |
| Distributors: | --> |
| Runtime: | 38 minutes |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Language: | English |
The Pleasure Garden is a 1953 short film written and directed by James Broughton, starring Hattie Jacques, Lindsay Anderson, and John Le Mesurier.[1]
Filmed among the ruins of the Crystal Palace Terraces, The Pleasure Garden is a poetic ode to desire, featuring a bureaucrat determined to stamp out any form of free expression.
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "This light extravaganza by the Californian poet James Broughton, whose 16-mm films (Mothers' Day, Loony Tom, etc.) have been seen over here, was financed by private subscription and shot entirely on location in the Crystal Palace Gardens, a perfect setting. It is a highly personal mixture of lyricism, mime, whimsy and caprice; some may find it too tenuous, but those who like it will like it very much indeed. It has a freedom all too rare in the cinema, and it is all freshly, unassumingly imagined: a real, a genuine lark. Professional and non-professional actors blend homogeneously under the director's eccentric guidance, Stanley Bate's music is full of entirely appropriate gaiety and invention, and Walter Lassally's photography is resourceful and attractively framed."[2]
The film won the Prix de Fantasie Poetique at Cannes in 1954.[3]
The Pleasure Garden was released on DVD in the UK by the BFI on 15 February 2010.[4] The release also includes The Phoenix Tower (UK, 1957, 39 min.), a short documentary charting the construction of the BBC's Crystal Palace Television Tower, plus a fully illustrated booklet with film notes, an original review and a history of the Crystal Palace.