399. Quadrophenia (1979)

Starring: Paul Daniels, Leslie Ash, Philip Davis

Director: Franc Roddam

Running Time: 117 mins

Quadrophenia is a British film that follows the life of a young man, Jimmy, and his experiences in the 60s mods and rockers era, and his reaction to the eventual decline of this outrageous musical time.

Well, I’ll say that this was certainly a different film, and it had quite an interesting concept, as well as being fascinating to me, as I was blissfully unaware of the scale of the rivalry between the mods and rockers, which this film portrayed very well indeed.

Despite the fact that it was an interesting topic to cover, I felt that this film was not the greatest in terms of cinematic entertainment. Rather than telling any sort of story for the majority of the duration, this instead was more of a documentation of the world of 60s Britain, with a character embodying the spirit at the centre.

As this was produced by The Who, I was expecting it to end up being a bit too much about the music and the fashion, rather than making a good story, and unfortunately, it was so, and as I’m not really aware of that context, I found myself a little confused about what was going on.

Having said that, the final period of the film was much better. A story finally emerged, in which Jimmy began to have an angry reactionary outburst to the fact that his dream society was disappearing, and his decline into near insanity was actually a lot more interesting to follow.

Overall, I’ll give this a 7.1, because it was an interesting idea on the face of things, but for anyone who isn’t a die-hard mod, it was a little confusing and alien to watch at times.