Bill Hays
2021Quartermaine's Terms
Bill Hays
Edward Fox, John Gielgud
The setting is the staffroom of an English language college for foreign students somewhere in Cambridge. I think that Edward Fox was born to play the role of protagonist St. John Quartermaine. St. John (pronounced 'sinjun') is a kind and lonely language professor who is becoming increasingly absent-minded and forgetful, probably due to some form of creeping dementia. Having loyally served at the college since its founding, his life revolves around work as he appears to have no social life of his own. He is well liked by his colleagues, however they take advantage of his good nature and are always too preoccupied with their own concerns to really notice what we the viewers see- a man gradually and inexorably heading towards crisis, in desperate need of care and support.
Quartermaine's Terms
A Turn for the Worse
Bill Hays
Bernard Hill, Max Hafler
Simon Simpson runs an entertainment agency in Liverpool. At one of his regular auditions in The Bootle Railway Club he sees an aggressive young man fresh from the dole queue who dreams of becoming a professional comedian. Simpson believes the boy has talent and starts to groom him for 'stardom'.
A Turn for the Worse
If There Weren't Any Blacks You'd Have to Invent Them
Bill Hays
Leonard Rossiter, Richard Beckinsale
Set in a cemetery, the film tells the story of a young man whom a blind man wrongly imagines to be black, and explores the nature of human prejudice.
If There Weren't Any Blacks You'd Have to Invent Them
Shades
Bill Hays
Tracey Childs, Francesca Gonshaw
1999: A tower block contains youths ‘bought off’ by the government, in a climate of microchip-created endless leisure, who experience (often pornographic) virtual reality-style fantasies by donning the titular ‘shades’, until a 1980s theme party (they predicted that right, at least) leads to ideology and political thought seeping in under the dazed lifestyle.
Shades