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Privilege

1967 Directed by Peter Watkins

The Raw, Shocking Movie Of A Pop Singer Who Makes It Big!

Britain's biggest pop singer, Steven Shorter, receives unwavering adulation and possesses total control over his rabid fans, which includes nearly the entire population. Yet Shorter is not an autonomous performer -- he is little more than a puppet for the government, promoting whatever agenda they see fit. When a beautiful artist, Vanessa Ritchie, is commissioned to paint his portrait, she pushes Shorter to question his obedience to his manipulative handlers.

Paul Jones Jean Shrimpton Mark London William Job Max Bacon Jeremy Child James Cossins

Country

Language

English

Alternative Titles

Privileg, Privilege – idol och rebell, امتیاز, 特权, 프리빌리지

Genre

Drama

Themes

Politics and human rights Legendary musicians and stardom Powerful poetic and passionate drama Show All…

Theatrical

28 Feb 1967

24 Jul 1967

USANR

UK

28 Feb 1967

Theatrical

USA

24 Jul 1967

TheatricalNR

103 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★½

Peter Watkins is the only great satirist that also happens to be humorless and dealing with this contradiction explains a lot of his appeal even when he seems dead set in drive me unsane.
Review by chavel ★★★½ 2

“I’m fed up with playing safe. What I’m reaching for is a way to make the audience believe that it is not looking at a movie, or a story, but that somehow what it is seeing on the screen is actually happening at that moment.” — British director Peter Watkins in a 1967 interview
I also found two internet sources where Peter Watkins says at least one scene from Privilege was “directly copied and used in Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.” But he doesn’t identify which scene? And the other question is, I cannot tell if Watkins is perturbed or flattered that Kubrick would steal from him since Watkins always rigorously tries to be diplomatic in his interviews? I would…
Review by Will Sloan

You can feel it in the air: conservatism is the new punk!
Watkins is unfortunately correct that mass culture tends to promote and uphold the dominant ideology. As a comedy, this is slightly funnier than The War Game. The pop remix of “Jerusalem” is an earworm. Do we know where Watkins stands on the Kardashians?
Review by Carlos Valladares 1

An obnoxiously obvious gem of a satire that attacks every pop-cultural-institution in 1967 (the British Invasion, the Church, cinema-vertité) with the precision of an out-of-control helicopter. The audaciousness of Peter Watkins's paranoiac images far exceeds the film's limitations to representing even a modestly exaggerated parody of real-life. The frame is an overblown one, hungry for effects (i.e., a rock concert, headlined by monk-garbed rockers singing "And did those feet in ancient times", at a Klan-Nuremberg-NASCAR rally). It is a juicy condemnation of the disintegration of humanistic pop-culture at the hands of the moneymen, the politicians, the clergy, the corporate shills. Crucially, the Beatles aren't the target of Watkins' Manchurian-Candidate rage; it's the Monkees, the Dave Clark 5, Manfred Mann (whose…
Review by 🇵🇱 Steve G 🇵🇸 ★★★★ 1

Steve's Priority Watchlist Project
Sure enough, the predictions and warnings that Peter Watkins pushed forward in Privilege have proved to be eerily prophetic. Just as they would be in Punishment Park.
So while it could be true to say that it doesn't offer anything in this day and age that we haven't seen come true or seen covered in other media since 1967, I looked it at it differently. It comes across more now like a 'told you so'. A film made by an intelligent person who took a look at the societal landscape and could see where things could easily go if we weren't careful.
A Clockwork Orange-esque worship clubs and concerts that morph into something Nazi adjacent are…
Review by Graham Williamson ★★★★ 1

Reviewed on Cinema Eclectica.
Maybe this is what's happened to Morrissey?
Review by Mark Cunliffe 🇵🇸 ★★★★★

On this week's Pop Screen Graham and I ostensibly take a look at this excellent, sobering satire from Peter Watkins but, as is our want, it becomes a tangent-filled edition that takes in everything from my dislike of both Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss' writing and the voice over in The Hateful Eight, to some of our favourite comedies and the situation in Ukraine. Plus a shout out to my old English teacher.
Now available on YouTube too.
Review by Sally Jane Black

Rock star fascism with a heavy dose of O Lucky Man aesthetics and religious iconography, a sort of rock'n'roll fantasy that really would only have worked during this era when superstardom was still relatively new, when the idea of conquering the world through pop music felt real. Thus, it feels dated, a paranoid boomer story that thrived in a world where the Beatles and the Stones still looked like gods. (Now, everyone is in Beyonce's shadow, as they should be.) In La Commune, Watkins would take the trappings of political imagery to their extremes in service of a leftist history piece, but here, he lays on thick the propagandist visuals in a rock'n'roll martydom piece, excoriating Britain, the church, the music industry, capitalism, and celebrity (and the worship thereof) all at once. But but but these critiques don't feel new or interesting anymore--we've seen it all come true.
Review by Mark Cunliffe 🇵🇸 ★★★★★

Privilege is one of those films from yesteryear that you watch back and find yourself baffled and frustrated that we learned nothing from it.
Directed by Peter Watkins - the genius behind such BBC productions as the anachronistic Culloden, which featured a modern day documentary film crew interviewing both the English and Scots soldiers of the 1746 battle and the controversial, banned for twenty years nuclear war docu-drama The War Game - Privilege would prove to be his only real commercial feature, and it wasn't in the least bit watered down for a more mainstream audience, relying on Watkins usual documentary, cinema verite stylings and packing a powerful message against the established order.
It tells the story (from an original…
Review by Richmond_Hill ★★★★

Peter Watkins’s satire on the dark birthing of 1960s pop music and its attendant messianic stardoms starts out bracingly near the knuckle, if not on the nose. Only the sitting duck of religious propaganda provides the necessary cover that probably meant the film was buried, but the filmmakers got to live (“We will conform” indeed).
Thus things are not as outlandishly disguised as they were at the Ludivco Medical Facility, but not too far south of Bloomsbury for many of the broadsides at very real social control to land. Watkins like Kubrick had little sense of humour, but at least Stanley was more adept at papering over the clues. Thus Privilege’s featured committee on cultural manipulation plays like a po-faced…
Review by freelunch ★★★½

Solid Peter Watkins, probably the most “accessible” film I’ve seen from him so far. He has never understood the word “subtlety” and I absolutely love that about him because he’s so damn creative with it - but here I was hoping it would be a lot more scathing. But his themes of celebrity worship and governments using it to distract people from real issues has aged impressively and somehow he even predicted Apple Watches lmao.
Also Jean Shrimpton is really, really good in this imo.
Review by loureviews ★★★★★ 2

I L<3ve Musicals!
"We will conform!"
There's a coalition government in power, and they pull the strings that make Steven Shorter the most adored and revered man on the planet, a pop star, a blank focus for all the hysteria of teenage life.
The suggestion of government interference in cultural life may have seemed proposterous in the late 60s, but in the 21st century we have indeed reached a point of dominance from manufactured music acts, reality television and vloggers who take payment to promote various commercial products.
Shorter is played by Paul Jones, who at this time had gone solo after a few years as lead singer of Manfred Mann - you may recall a TV clip where he…

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Privilege

Synopsis

The Raw, Shocking Movie Of A Pop Singer Who Makes It Big!

Cast

Director

Writers

Studio

Country

Language

Alternative Titles

Genre

Themes

Releases by Date

Theatrical

28 Feb 1967

24 Jul 1967

Releases by Country

UK

28 Feb 1967

USA

24 Jul 1967

Popular reviews

Where to watch

Privilege

Synopsis

The Raw, Shocking Movie Of A Pop Singer Who Makes It Big!

Cast

Director Director

Writers Writers

Studio

Country

Language

Alternative Titles

Genre

Themes

Theatrical

28 Feb 1967

24 Jul 1967

UK

28 Feb 1967

USA

24 Jul 1967

Popular reviews

Similar Films

Director

Writers