Here we take a ‘Missing on Blu’ Review break thanks to the Public Domain availability of a show we aren’t convinced was ever given a legit disc release, legit as in ‘authorized.’ England’s 1956 Michael Anderson version of George Orwell’s legendary book dropped (mostly) out of sight long ago, and this was the first time I’ve seen it intact as an adult viewer. Edmond O’Brien, Jan Sterling, Michael Redgrave and Donald Pleasence are excellent, and we like a lot of the supporting players as well. The production impresses in every way. We think we have the ‘true story’ of the film’s two versions, with two contrasting finales. “This is not a story of space ships and men from other planets, but the immediate future.”

1984  (1956)
Not On Home Video
Missing on Blu Review
1956 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 91 min.
Starring: Edmond O’Brien, Michael Redgrave, Jan Sterling, David Kossoff, Mervyn Johns, Donald Pleasence, Carol Wolveridge, Ernest Clark, Patrick Allen, Ronan O’Casey, Michael Ripper, Ewen Solon, Kenneth Griffith. Walter Gotell.
Cinematography: C.M. Pennington-Richards
Art Director: Terence Verity
Film Editor: Bill Lewthwaite
Composer: Malcolm Arnold
Screenplay by William Templeton, Ralph Gilbert Bettinson freely adapted from the novel by George Orwell
Produced by N. Peter Rathvon
Directed by Michael Anderson

We haven’t seen this first feature film version of George Orwell’s novel since it dropped out of sight from American TV showings in the 1960s. It fell into a gray area shared by a few movies became difficult to see … like Joseph Losey’s remake of Fritz Lang’s  “M”, which only a few years ago turned up again on TCM, but without a disc release. Then there’s Otto Preminger’s 70mm musical adaptation  Porgy and Bess, which is apparently blocked by the Gershwin Estate. In the case of director Michael Anderson’s 1984 (1956), the Orwell estate blocked its continued release, and then a succeeding rights holder (reportedly) blocked it so as to not interfere with the production of a remake, presumably the 1984 Michael Radford version with Richard Burton and John Hurt,  Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s now a public domain title.

We’ve seen and enjoyed kinescopes of the BBC Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), adapted by Nigel Kneale and starring Peter Cushing, Yvonne Mitchell and André Morell.  →  It may still be the best version yet, despite some of its TV limitations. But until recently we’d seen only a couple of minutes of this very good 1956 theatrical version, starring Edmond O’Brien, Jan Sterling and Michael Redgrave. It wasn’t always reviewed positively, despite being reasonably faithful to the Orwell book.

For many American kids of the 1960s, George Orwell was our first introduction to the concept of totalitarianism. I remember a substitute teacher in the 5th grade who told me I shouldn’t be reading my pocketbook of 1984, that he should confiscate it. But I also remember that the substitute spent half of the day playing the guitar for us and singing Christian songs. When wondering why more movie versions weren’t made of 1984, I often theorized that the book’s highly original ideas had been ‘borrowed’ so often by later fictional dystopias, that a faithful remake would be lacking in impact. Terry Gilliam’s wonderful  Brazil is essentially a remake of 1984, updating and elaborating the original.

Orwell didn’t pitch his 1948 book as futuristic, but as an ‘it could happen here’ tale of England more or less as it was in the immediate postwar years, with harsh rationing only the tip of a movement to set up a socially-oriented government. It’s really against Stalinism. By combining surveillance technology and an efficient system of secret police, an oppressive regime has enslaved England in a way that makes rebellion impossible.

Although credited to different writers, this theatrical release adapts 1984 very close to what Nigel Kneale had come up with for the BBC. Although distributed by Columbia Pictures it’s a British production all the way. The simplified story drops the most book’s sordid and cruel details: Winston Smith’s appalling childhood, his episode with a prostitute, and citizens cheering at propaganda film of women and children being machine-gunned. It’s curious that actor Donald Pleasance repeats from the TV version, playing more or less the same role. The BBC TV show confirmed the stardom of Peter Cushing, but he wasn’t asked to perform in the film version. As with some English thrillers, American stars were imported to play the lead ‘romantic’ roles.

‘Atomic raids’ have laid ruin to much of the world. Power now rests with three political entities at perpetual war with each other: Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia. Nuclear weapons have been abandoned (are we sure this is a dystopia?) but Oceania is at present waging a conventional war with Eurasia. The perpetual war footing allows a permanent martial law, and enables the ruling parties to enforce absolute power over their populations.

London is now the capital of ‘Airstrip 1,’ a province of Oceania. Much of London still looks bombed-out, but it is home to Oceania’s new bomb-proof ministries. The Ministry of Plenty deals with shortages. The Ministry of Peace oversees the constant war. The Ministry of Love covers policing and torture. The Ministry of Truth controls all information and party propaganda. Most citizens of Airstrip 1 are workers, ‘proles’ that labor in poverty. Outer Party members work in the Ministries and have modest salaries, but no special privileges. Inner Party members wield real authority. They have access to privileges and information that Outer Party members do not.

Nobody has personal privacy. Public spaces are all under video surveillance; everyone’s room has a ‘telescreen,’ a TV camera through which unseen authorites monitor all citizens. When arriving home, citizens must show their ID badge, any papers they carry ‘pat themselves down’ for the video eye. We understand this now more than would a viewer of 1956. It’s like living with a constant TSA airport security squad in your home, watching and correcting everything you do.

Outer Party Member Winston Smith (Edmond O’Brien) job is to revise newpapers and books to fit present Party policy. Inner Party supervisor O’Connor is quick to corrects Winston: he’s ‘rectifying speeches and wrongly reported incidents.’ Winston is polite to his nosy neighbor Parsons (Donald Pleasence) and puts up with Parsons’ daughter Selina (Carol Wolveridge), who is eager to find traitors she can turn in to the Thought Police. Winston witnesses the arrest of citizens Jones and Rutherford (Mervyn Johns and Ronan O’Casey). He knows that the two are scapegoats that have just awarded honors. But all that news and history has been vaporized. Some of Winston’s co-workers disappear without warning, and one has to think that they’ve been vaporized too. They are called ‘unpersons.’

The seed of Winston’s rebellion comes from the secret illegal diary he keeps, risking his neck by writing phrases like ‘Down with Big Brother.’ The only break from work are frequent ‘Hate Rallies,’ where citizens chant against whatever enemies Big Brother is calling ‘the worst ever’ at the moment. At one big rally on the street, Jones and Rutherford are marched out to ‘spontaneously confess,’ as in a Stalin-era show trial.

Outer Party member Julie (Jan Sterling) defies the laws against casual friendships between men and women in the Outer Party. The non-fraternization is enforced by the ‘Anti-Sex League.’  A new League plan is on the way to eliminate all sexual activity (presumably through artificial insemination?). In the meantime all marriages are arranged by the party, to the party’s advantage.

Winston and Julia secretly declare their mutual love. She’s had secret lovers before; she arranges meetings in country fields and the bell tower of an abandoned church. Winston finds them a semi-permanent trysting spot, an unused room above an antique shop that has no telescreen.  The sympathetic proprietor Charrington (David Kossoff) even redecorates for them. They become so happy that Julia even thinks about having a child. Winston becomes convinced that O’Connor is secretly a member of the underground; they eventually choose to contact him about dedicating their lives to fighting Big Brother. O’Connor has them drop by his lavish apartment. They are amazed that he is allowed to switch off his telescreen for limited time periods.

The basic story of 1984 still feels fresh, and this 1956 adaptation is well produced. The BBC show had depended almost entirely on its actors, with tiny crowds and frequent weak visuals. Director Michael Anderson uses mattes and painted artwork to sketch a convincing London under totalitarian rule. The crumbling city is dotted with signs carrying the famous Big Brother slogans — War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery — and plenty of glowering portraits of Big Brother himself.

But this interpretation isn’t as hard-edged as was the Kneale- Peter Cushing TV show, which had included torture scenes that traumatized England in 1954. Edmond O’Brien and Jan Sterling’s romance is more sentimental, and the Ministry of Love’s torture in Room 101 is over almost before it begins. The movie plays well, but Peter Cushing’s fearful freakout was much stronger — we are convinced that O’Connor has broken down Winston’s personality. O’Connor describes the process as a cure: he doesn’t make martyrs, he converts heretics. His speech has some of the ‘human values are a burden’ rhetoric we hear in Don Siegel’s  Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It distills the mening of totalitarianism: Big Brother wants not just obedience, but full control of our thoughts. Do you disagree with the authorities?  More electroshock therapy is indicated. The paranoia quotient is strong as well. When Julia and Winston meet at the end we worry about yet another betrayal, and feel a bit of the same creepy vibe in the last seconds of Philip Kaufman’s  Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The special effects are good and the camerawork even better. Cinematographer C.M. Pennington-Richards has credits on the expressive 1951 version of A Christmas Carol and also the atmospheric blacklist-exile picture  Give Us This Day (Christ in Concrete). When Winston prowls at night the lighting is very noir — nobody is allowed to loiter in this oppressed city. Young Selina spies on Winston, and at one point catches him wandering off the sidewalk, into a dark vacant lot. Some of the angles and cutting momentarily remind us of  Things to Come, England’s most elaborate Science-fiction film until 2001: A Space Odyssey. The light in the telescreen ‘eyes’ blink and pulse, an effect that make them look like they’re focusing, or thinking. They remind us of Kubrick and Clarke’s HAL-9000.

Speaking of influences, a cut to a round light fixture in an interrogation room reminds us of the various lamps that Jean-Luc Godard used to represent his computer menace in  Alphaville. The biggest ‘borrower’ of 1984’s ideas has to be George Lucas, whose stylish first feature  THX-1138 tells roughly the same story by nonverbal means. Lucas borrows Michael Anderson’s all-white waiting room as a kind of limbo for arrestees, awaiting removal to various torture chambers. There’s no doubt that Lucas is plagiarizing honoring 1984: actor Donald Pleasence plays roughly the same role for a third time.

Edmond O’Brien and the always sad-looking Jan Sterling are excellent, as far as the screenplay allows them to go. We’ve seen so many movies with similar stories, that Winston and Julia now seem naïve to even think of trusting their lives to someone like O’Connor. It is demonstrated that the Ministry of Truth can reshape facts and history into any form they want, without accountability. As fantastic conspiracies are the basis of so much of today’s entertainment, today’s viewers will likely wonder if the real purpose of Big Brother’s propaganda machine is to create Political Theater to stimulate and pacify the citizenship. ‘Traitor of the week’ purges keep the public discussion away from shortages, and the constant threat/glorious victories being touted could be fake as well. Maybe Oceania does have an army fighting somewhere. Are the ‘enemy’ bombing raids inflicted by the Inner Party strategists, to maintain the illusion of war?

George Orwell’s 1984 nailed the very true idea that despots will start and prolong wars to stay in power, and routinely describe their war crimes as ‘purely defensive.’  Orwell was unhappy that reviewers classified his book as speculative fantasy. He claimed that ‘1984’ was already here.

Although very nicely mounted, this version of 1984 is not really a prestige production. Besides the three stars, we get a cross-section of mid-to low-level players, nicely directed. Having accepted that he’s automatically guilty of whatever he might be accused of, Donald Pleasence’s Parsons is a sad case indeed. We also see a subdued Mervyn Johns in just two scenes; he’s an excellent choice to play a man forced to publicly confess. A vaporizer likely awaits as soon as his propaganda usefulness is finished.

Patrick Allen is good as a Thought Police interrogator; we know his voice from English trailers. Future Hammer stalwart Michael Ripper delivers a pro- Big Brother rally speech, as does the lesser-known Ewen Solon. Walter Gotell  ↖  gets an okay bit as a police functionary, while favorite Kenneth Griffith  ↑  pegs his terrified arrestee in just a few seconds.

BBC apparently didn’t secure movie rights, or the feature might have been produced by Hammer Films, retaining Peter Cushing in the lead. The producers also appear to have hedged their bet in another way. Columbia Pictures distributed 1984 both in England and the U.S..  The Daily Variety reviewer of March 6, 1956 caught a screening in London, and reported seeing a finale entirely different from the one we see here. Two separate endings were shot and finished; the one for England made Winston and Julia into rebel martyrs. They die by gunfire while screaming ‘Down with Big Brother’ at a Hate Rally.  The brainwashing didn’t take, I suppose.

George Orwell died in 1950, and may not have approved any of these adaptations of his books. It may be an apocryphal story, but some reports say that Orwell’s widow decided not to renew the rights to this version of 1984 because the altered ending perverted her husband’s entire theme. You should have shown her the American version, dummies.  It preserves Orwell’s original finish.

Much better documented is the story of the making of Halas & Bachelor’s animated film adaptation of Orwell’s  Animal Farm — which ends with a similar thematic flip-flop … a happy counterrevolution. That Animal Farm was quietly bankrolled by the C.I.A., to serve as pro-West propaganda. We’re told that the producers, to get the widow Orwell to sign off on the contract, arranged for her to meet her favorite star, Clark Gable. That has to be the nicest thing anybody did to win the Cold War.

The English 1956 version of 1984 is to our knowledge a Public Domain title, and not presently available on an authorized disc release. We don’t know if Columbia maintains its printing elements, which may have stayed in England. It’s too bad that no rights holder can step forward, as a restoration – remaster of this classic would be welcomed by an audience much bigger than the Sci-fi fantasy crowd. Does the BFI perhaps hold both endings of the film?

The film’s acknowledged Public Domain status allows us to point readers to encodings on the web. A colorized version can be found at The Internet Archive, but the best version we’ve seen is presently viewable on  YouTube. It’s intact and of very good quality. If we’re properly informed, it’s the American version.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

1984 — (1956)
Not On Home Video
Reviewed: September 12, 2025
(7393orwe)

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