Charlie Bubbles
| Charlie Bubbles | |
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| Directed by | Albert Finney |
| Produced by | Michael Medwin |
| Written by | Shelagh Delaney |
| Starring |
Albert Finney Billie Whitelaw Liza Minnelli Colin Blakely |
| Music by | Misha Donat |
| Cinematography | Peter Suschitzky |
| Edited by | Fergus McDonell |
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Release date
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Running time
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89 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $1 million |
Charlie Bubbles is a 1967 British comedy-drama film starring Billie Whitelaw and Albert Finney, and also featuring a young Liza Minnelli. It was listed to compete at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but the festival was cancelled due to the events of May 1968 in France.
The film made great play of its Manchester setting, contrasting the return of its eponymous lead character, played by Finney, to his home city after achieving success as a writer in London. During his return he visits his former wife, played by Whitelaw, in Derbyshire (actually filmed near Pendle Hill in Lancashire) and watches a Manchester United match at Old Trafford, featuring footage of Bobby Charlton and Denis Law with his son. They are cut off from the outside world in a glass-fronted box as they watch the match. Finney's character is bored with his success and his privileged position, which allows him to indulge himself in most ways he wishes. One of these is a relationship with his secretary Eliza, played by Minnelli.
Bubbles glides around in a gold Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III convertible – CB 1E, contrasting sharply with the working class life and the poverty of post-war Salford. From London along the newly constructed M1, Bubbles heads to Manchester, a journey that is depicted as taking almost an age to complete. The scenes at the petrol station before they set off, and at the motorway service station with Yootha Joyce portrayed as an ostentatious millionairess and Alan Lake the RAF squaddie who cadges a lift and eventually drives the Rolls, tell a story of two tales. When they arrive in Manchester the reference to the colliery and the gas works further put forward the message that Bubbles has come a long way since he was a boy, but that even now after his success he isn't really fulfilled. Liza Minnelli photographing the hatchet-faced old man at a bus stop and the child on a bike whilst driving open-top along the cobbled crumbling streets of and cleared Victorian working class terraced houses is particularly poignant.
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