I Start Counting (1969): or, when is a reissue really a box set? (Review)

The BFI’s Flipside label has a reputation for unearthing the seamier, seedier side of British cinema, which is true but it isn’t the limits of the range’s ambitions. It would be hard to fit Bill Forsyth’s That Sinking Feeling or the John Mortimer adaptation Lunch Hour into such a scheme, for example. But even when a film does have a scandalous reputation, it might not deserve it. Flipside have previously rescued Ian Merrick’s The Black Panther (nothing to do with Wakanda!) from its brief tabloid infamy, and now they’re aiming to repeat the trick with David Greene’s I Start Counting.

I Start Counting was sold as a lurid psycho-thriller, with posters promising blood and foregrounding the sex appeal of its star Jenny Agutter. As well as being a tremendously accomplished actor, Agutter would go on to become a sex symbol throughout the 1970s and 80s, but 1969 – one year prior to her famous role in The Railway Children – was a little too early for the British public to be ready for that. Factor in that her character, Wynne, is fourteen years old (Agutter was sixteen at the time of filming) and is obsessed with her 32-year-old stepbrother… well, you expect something truly unpalatable to a modern-day audience. Yet while I Start Counting is definitely not a comfortable film, it’s nowhere near as crass as its marketing. It disturbs, yes, but not because changing values have rendered it inadvertently disturbing. It disturbs when Greene wants it to disturb you, and not a second before.

Despite his most famous credit being the film version of Godspell, Greene acquits himself extremely well with this combustible thriller material. His visual language is full of swoops and zooms, not unlike the work of Robert Altman, albeit before Altman had broken through. It is, unquestionably, done for budgetary reasons – cheaper to zoom in than to prepare a new camera set-up – but it works. There’s a dazzling shot early on in the film which takes you from a group of children running through a park to a corpse at the bottom of a lake. These days a cinematographer like Emmanuel Lubezki might create a sweeping magic trick out of that core idea, but the simplicity with which cameraman Alex Thompson manages it is impressive in its own way.

The cast is uniformly strong, from Agutter’s lead – confident and mature enough to effectively foreshadow the rest of her career – to a delightful cameo from Michael Feast as a hippie who repels Wynne’s parents. The score includes a suite of pop songs co-written by composer Basil Kirchin, which can be naively deployed in that “sing what you see” way common to early pop scores, but the title song is a gorgeous ballad sung with perfect vulnerability by Lindsey Moore. The script is by Richard Harris – not the actor, but the prolific TV writer who co-created Man in a Suitcase – from a novel by Audrey Erskine-Lindop. Erskine-Lindop was a popular writer across a number of genres, but she seems to have fallen from view since her death in 1986. On this evidence, some sympathetic publisher like Virago or Serpent’s Tail should reissue her work. I Start Counting‘s central plot idea – a girl falling for a man who might be a serial killer – prefigures Michael Pearce’s acclaimed 2017 film Beast, while the dream-like, Freudian mood stands comparison with early Angela Carter novels such as The Magic Toyshop (whose 1986 adaptation must be a candidate for a future Flipside release).

The film itself, though, is only the start of it. There are some conventional extras here, the most charming of which is a 20-minute interview with Agutter talking about how much she enjoyed working with Greene and how happy she is to see the film resurface. As ever, though, the BFI includes some more adventurous selections, and there are enough of them to give I Start Counting the feel of a box set rather than a reissue. Anyone doubting the sensitivity with which I Start Counting treats adolescent sexuality can compare it to Don’t Be Like Brenda, a maddeningly sexist educational short about teen pregnancy included in this set. There is also a Children’s Film Foundation production with a script co-written by Erskine-Lindop – Danger on Dartmoor – which reprises some of the themes of I Start Counting in a very different register. The two adorable moppets in Danger on Dartmoor are supposed to be thirteen years old, just one year younger than Wynne, but the difference in maturity is far, far greater than a mere twelve months.

The most unexpected and fascinating extra, though, takes its cue from I Start Counting‘s Bracknell locations. Bracknell was one of the UK’s post-war “new towns”, which translates on-screen to a lot of demolition sites and building sites that Agutter can run through. British cinema in general has been less drawn to the suburbs than Hollywood, so the BFI have taken this release as a rare opportunity to explore the initial promise of the new towns programme. As a result, there are three short films about new towns included here, each of which take a different approach to the subject matter. The Dylan Thomas-scripted New Towns for Old is made in a stirring style akin to war propaganda, while the similarly-titled New Town From Old is a purely observational documentary about the development of Hemel Hempstead. Charley in New Town, meanwhile, is a jaunty cartoon explanation of new town life from Joy Batchelor and John Halas, most famous for their animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Together, they suggest a new way of considering not just I Start Counting, but the whole of British cinema’s relationship to the country’s towns and suburbs.

Often accused of being pretentious, the Style Council chose to face down these allegations in 1987 by promoting their album The Cost of Loving with a non-linear musical satire on British identity in the age of Thatcherism, narrated by a pre-Reverend Richard Coles. Surprisingly, this did not stop people from calling them pretentious, and the resulting film JerUSAlem (it is our sad duty to confirm that yes, you saw what they did there) vanished from sight

APRIL POP SCREEN +

Thanks for reading Graham’s review of I Start Counting

For more Music and Pop Music Chat, check out our Podcast, Pop Screen