Now that the English Revolution is so rarely mentioned in schools, the time is ripe for this restoration (to use an unfortunate word) at London's BFI Southbank of the 1975 film by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo about Gerrard Winstanley. He was the 17th-century radical whose commune in 1649 dug up and cultivated common land for sustenance of the poor. Based on David Caute's 1961 novel Comrade Jacob, this docu-drama looks a little rough and ready now, but with stark monochrome beauty, and the film has a high-mindedness and an intriguing vernacular plainness appropriate to the subject, almost like the kind of film Winstanley would have made. Playing Winstanley himself, former teacher Miles Halliwell is a sympathetic, unworldly patrician-donnish figure - Right but Romantic, to paraphrase Sellar and Yeatman - though as his speeches are taken verbatim from Winstanley's published writings, his performance is necessarily a little stately.
There is also a not unpleasing hint of Pythonesque eccentricity in the downtrodden peasants and haughty horsemen. If you were to play the "double-bill" parlour game with Winstanley, then Monty Python and the Holy Grail might be a facetious suggestion. A serious one would be Peter Watkins's 1964 TV film Culloden. Credited as script consultant is Marina Lewycka, then a PhD student in 17th-century history, who 30 years later was to publish her bestselling debut novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.
