Horace Ové’s fascinating, pioneering drama from 1975 is restored and re-released as part of a retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank. The first full-length black British film, Pressure is vigorous and rough-hewn and Ové lays down the broad brushstrokes with compulsive energy. It has the punchy quality of a 21st-century graphic novel, eagerly tackling Black Power and social realism, mixing comedy, tragedy and irony. There’s a surreal fantasy sequence, a moment of real horror in a hospital and a full-on Sweeney-style police foot-chase through the streets.
The film’s reappearance may be a madeleine for the 70s, but it’s also a reminder that the pressure Britain’s black communities have withstood hasn’t subsided. We are now watching this film the other side of the New Cross fire, Stephen Lawrence, and the Teresa May “hostile environment” policy which was chillingly deporting those very same Windrush veterans on whose experiences and legacy Britain’s media establishment had been sentimentally congratulating itself for the 70th anniversary in 2018. To watch the movie on the big screen is an eerie experience: the grimness of west London’s pre-gentrified Ladbroke Grove is revealed in dreamlike, deep-focus, pinsharp detail. Ové brilliantly uses real people and real streetscapes behind his characters as they stroll up and down; there’s a great moment when a baffled, irritated woman comes right up behind the action, mid-dialogue, grumpily trying to get past.
Pressure is the story of a single Trinidadian family. Lucas, played with dignity and presence by Frank Singuineau, is a Windrush incomer who runs a corner shop. He is married to the fierce Bopsie, a great performance from Lucita Lijertwood. Their two sons are Colin, a radical portrayed with terrific, Brandoesque power by Oscar James, and the shy and sweet-natured Tony (Herbert Norville), who is still earnestly applying for jobs and hoping to be accepted in the white mainstream. (Norville later gave a wonderful performance in Jack Rosenthal’s drama The Chain.) As Tony becomes more disaffected, he gets caught up in crime as well as Colin’s political world; he also experiences racism from the police and the pinch-faced landlady of a white girl whom Tony had been shyly walking back to her place.
My favourite scene in Pressure is the excruciating sequence when Tony comes for an interview for a white-collar filing job in some down-at-heel government department. His very presence causes pressure, a weird miasma of smiling unease among the entire staff as he is ushered into the manager’s office for the interview (although the glimpse of this man’s secret porn stash is a moment of broad comedy at odds with the subtlety of this moment). All too clearly everyone had been expecting a white candidate, and now the interviewer has to go through the motions of a fair-minded assessment before he is able to usher this disturbing person back out the door. The interview is artificially distended and lengthened by the manager, who has a fixed, glassy-eyed expression, as he makes an elaborate show of poring over Tony’s CV and qualifications. He occasionally looks up with a polite, quizzical smile – mannerisms which are intended to pacify and subdue and, as Tony is only now learning, do not indicate any genuine thoughtfulness or even honest indecision on the interviewer’s part. It is a theatre of polite rejection.
Tony will finally find a kind of acceptance in the Black Power movement, and it is his character, the “English” kid who was born in England, who has an important, and what in 2023 we might call an intersectional, insight. Black people in Britain experience racism in parallel to the white working classes’ experiences of exclusion and snobbery, while the latter are encouraged to hate black people to feel better about themselves. For his part, Colin offers a critique of capitalism and culture when he holds up an avocado (in 1975, still an exotic delicacy for Britain’s dinner party classes) and says that back in Trinidad they are called “zaboca” and so commonplace they are used to feed pigs. Pressure still has enormous power.
• Pressure is released on 3 November in UK and Irish cinemas.
