1984

Double plus good

released OUT NOW! (HMV exclusive) 1984 | 15 | Blu-ray/dVd/download Director Michael radford Cast John Hurt, richard Burton, suzanna Hamilton, Cyril Cusack

John Hurt did wounded very, very well. His greatest screen turns – Quentin Crisp, John Merrick – were all about vulnerability and damage. It’s a quality that made him the perfect choice for Winston Smith. Milk-pale, insect-thin and bronchial, it’s a performance that haunts this movie like a ghost, the walking “dead man” of George Orwell’s nightmarish future fable.

For all that the fascist pomp of the opening scene recalls Queen’s video for “Radio Ga Ga” – released the same year – this isn’t the shiny ’80s take on the book you may imagine (ironically, the film’s best remembered for its Eurythmics tie-in song, “Sexcrime”, nowhere to be heard here). In fact it’s faithfully, unremittingly bleak. Roger Deakins’s cinematography captures a world that looks like the ’40s in slow decay, all rotary dials and bakelite wireless sets, cracked windows and soot-stained walls (the location work makes good use of pre-gentrification London, soon to be swept away).

Hurt’s the star but it’s Richard Burton’s glacial, electrifyingly understated turn as Inner Party interrogator O’Brien that’s the stand-out, the personification of Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face – forever”.

Extras Theatrical trailer, four art cards.

The film was shot between April and June 1984, the exact time imagined by George Orwell in the original novel.

He hoped he finally looked heroin chic.