Unman, Wittering and Zigo
directed by John Mackenzie
starring David Hemmings, Tony Haygarth, Douglas Wilmer
Arrow Video
Starting life as a 1958 BBC radio play, Unman, Wittering and Zigo was also adapted for television in 1965 before hitting the big screen in 1971 with actor David Hemmings (Deep Red, 1975) in the lead. Wanting to escape the rat race of London, advertising exec John Ebony takes a job as a replacement teacher at a secluded public boys school. Ebony has never taught before and gets the position when the Lower 5B’s teacher, Mr. Pelham, dies in a fall from one of the cliffs on the school’s grounds. Ebony is woefully unprepared for the boys of the Lower 5B, and the boys are clearly in charge. When Ebony attempts to wrest control from the boys, they matter-of-factly inform him if he doesn’t give them their way, they will murder him as they did with his predecessor. Ebony soon becomes obsessed with finding out if his class actually killed their teacher, and he goes along with their increasingly dubious demands while he tries to identify the leader who could have orchestrated the crime, if any crime even happened.
The film plays both as a mystery thriller and as an ersatz schoolboy drama. It certainly turns the heroic teacher trope on its head when the idealistic new teacher quickly decides to not teach his class at all. These are clearly not kids that need saving; society needs to be saved from them. By their own admission, the Lower 5B only has six students who are actually smart, and the rest just want to read comics or play cards. The smart ones want some aid getting into university, and the others just have parents that want them graduating from a prestigious school. The class warfare at play in Unman, Wittering and Zigo is utterly scorched earth. Ebony’s new money is no match for the old money kids, and everyone at the Chantry School for Boys knows it.
David Hemmings made a career playing mildly unlikeable and ineffectual leading men, and his John Ebony may be the most clueless of them all. Suspension of disbelief in this tale becomes difficult, to say the least, especially in Ebony’s drive to uncover the truth, even after he’s informed he will not be retained after the term ends. The boys are all quite good, even if there is little to differentiate them for the viewers. They aren’t really individual characters, as the Lower 5B operates as a collective entity and the actual boys don’t matter. This is of course the same schooling system that was skewered in William Golding’s classic novel Lord of the Flies and the experimental rock film Pink Floyd–The Wall.
Although little known in the US, Unman, Wittering and Zigo was, for decades, essential viewing for British youth. Arrow Video’s new Blu-ray celebrates the film while introducing it to American audiences. The disc has featurettes with cast members, an introduction to the film by film critic Matthew Sweet, and audio commentary from writer/filmmaker Sean Hogan and film critic/author Kim Newman. Arrow also includes the 1958 radio play, which makes for a fascinating comparison to the film.
Unman, Wittering and Zigo is an odd, and at times unsettling, film that doesn’t always work, but it is nonetheless a fascinating bit of peculiar British cinema.
