Jan 23rd
The Bowler and the Bunnet**  
(GB TVM 1967)   
Scottish TV. 36m. bw                    

Forthright TV documentary about the struggle of the Glasgow shipbuilders Fairfield to keep its workers by trying to form an uneasy alliance with its managers. Entertainingly stylish with Connery enjoying his own visual indulgences in his first (and only) attempt at directing.

w: Clifford Hanley
p: Bryan Izzard
d/s: Sean Connery
ph: Bill Scott, Mario Ford

+ with thanks to the BFI Mediatheque

++ Connery's opening narration: "Scotland, the country of the extremes. Love of life, hatred of life. Poets and murders, rigid temperance and savage drinking. John Knox and Johnnie Walker. England can lose 8,000 people by immigration in a year, Scotland, nearly 50,000. A nation of movers or stayers. Population 5 million, most important export: human beings. Prosperity and poverty. Vast empty landscapes, and the most congested slums in Europe. Warm hearts and idiot violence. A country of sturdy democracy and savage class hatred side-by-side. Always the division, the gulf between opposites. The bosses and the workers, Them and Us. The bowler, and the bunnet."