Unman, Wittering and Zigo

A forgotten gem, this is one of the earliest films John Mackenzie directed after a few years working in television, before he returned to television in time to shoot some of the finest Play For Todays of the 1970s. And along with The Long Good Friday and Ruby this is Mackenzie finest achievement in the cinema. A stunning thriller, this is an assured, efficient filming of a chilly concept. David Hemmings is excellently vulnerable in the lead, the perfect Hitchcockian hero, believed by nobody apart from the viewer. The class of boys includes a young Michael Kitchen, and there's Tony haygarth as a world weary colleague whose lack of joie de vivre begins to corrupt Hemmings as much as his class do.

The most frightening sequence is the shocking persecution of the wife in the squash courts, a superbly staged scene that is quite a jaw-dropper considering the age of the film. In fact it is more the quaint English setting that adds the real shyock to the scene. It is interesting to compare this film with two other public school movies of the era, inevitably Lindsay Anderson's If....but more significantly the brilliant Walk A Crooked Path

which similarly portrays the public school boys as corrupt, ruthless and cold blooded, brilliantly adept at money making, no matter how immorally, and trained to view the world with a haughty authority.

Unman Wittering And Zigo is a truly gripping thriller, and proves Mackenzie is a great thriller maker as he illustrated in pieces like Dennis Potter's Double Dare and The Long Good Friday even more vividly.