Fellow Traveller
Fellow Traveller has the rare distinction of being a British film that actually looks international. Helmer Philip Saville shows a big-screen feel with the story of a blacklisted Hollywood screen-writer during the McCarthy era who is forced to Britain to find work.
Fellow Traveller has the rare distinction of being a British film that actually looks international. Helmer Philip Saville shows a big-screen feel with the story of a blacklisted Hollywood screen-writer during the McCarthy era who is forced to Britain to find work.
Pic goes some way in covering the commie-bashing McCarthy Era 1950s, but eventually becomes rather simplistic when trying to debate the actual politics of the time.
Glossy opening is set beside a luxury swimming pool in Hollywood where film star Clifford Byrne (Hart Bochner) shoots himself. At the same time in London, his friend Asa Kaufman (Ron Silver) is escaping the McCarthyist witch-hunt and – illegally – looking for work.
A series of flashbacks shows that Bochner and Silver were best friends. In England Silver takes a false name, starts writing a TV series, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and searches for Bochner’s English girlfriend (Imogen Stubbs), whom he has a brief affair with; he also mulls over politics with her leftie friends.
Silver is convincing as the cynical writer thrown into a strange English environment, and Hart Bochner looks the handsome leading man, replete with Errol Flynn mustache. Pic is excellent at re-creating the early heady days of independent TV in the UK.
Fellow Traveller
UK - US
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