the duke…

Roger Mitchell’s film ‘The Duke’ opened this afternoon at the Watershed and Moira+I attended the first showing of its ‘run’. Given the awful events in Ukraine, I felt a little guilty booking the tickets - because I did so knowing full well that the film would bring a smile to our faces at a time when so many others were suffering.
But, in the end, I’m very glad we did.
Somehow, watching a feel-good film about someone operating with the best of motives and for the benefit of others was a reminder that, even at the worst of times, there are bright pin-pricks of light.
 
The film is based on the true story of Kempton Bunton (quite brilliantly played by Jim Broadbent), a Newcastle cab driver who in 1965 appeared at the Old Bailey for stealing Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from London’s National Gallery.
Bunton writes dozens of unpublished novels and unproduced plays (emotionally driven by the tragic death of his daughter) and is briefly imprisoned for refusing to pay for his TV licence on the grounds that he has removed the cathode that allows his set to receive the BBC. He’s something of a working-class eccentric – frequently protesting at the government’s misuse of taxpayers’ money, standing up for workers’ rights and the like. The excellent Helen Mirren plays his exasperated, but loving, wife Dorothy.
Bunton ends up making a trip to London to petition for pensioners to be given free TV licences – a trip which ends up taking him to the National Gallery, where they’ve just spent £140,000 of public money to secure Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington (which Kempton describes as being “some half-baked portrait by a Spanish drunk” and argues that the cash would have been better spent providing free TV licences for all the UK’s old age pensioners. Bunton is one of those stubborn, eccentric individualists – at times hugely irritating, but also someone with admirable determination and energy (and with the best of motives).
I loved this film. I loved the story. I loved the characters and I loved the acting. Yes, it might have been over-sentimentalised at times… but it gave me a very warm feeling inside and made me smile – something we all need in these difficult and testing times.
You have to see it.