No Love for Johnnie

No Love for Johnnie (1961)

It Scorches With All the Intensity of Truth

Johnnie Byrne is a member of the British Parliament. In his 40s, he's feeling frustrated with his life and his personal as well as professional problems tower up over him. His desires to win the next election are endangered by his constant looking for love and he is faced with the choice of giving up a career in politics or giving up the woman he loves.

Date of release
1961-02-14
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (9)
Runtime
1h 50m
Genres
Drama
Director
Ralph Thomas

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Pinewood Studios

No Love for Johnnie is a 1961 British drama film in CinemaScope directed by Ralph Thomas and starring Peter Finch. It was written by Mordecai Richler and Nicholas Phipps based on the 1959 novel No Love for Johnnie by the Labour Member of Parliament Wilfred Fienburgh.

Development

Film rights were bought by Sydney Box who hired Mordecai Richler to do the script and David Deutsch to produce. Richler said the original hope was for Jack Clayton to direct. However two weeks into Richler working on a script, Box had a heart attack and retired, and Deutsch moved on to another project. No Love for Johnnie transferred to Betty Box and Ralph Thomas. They were dissastifed with Richler's script and had Nicholas Phiipps work on it.

Box and Thomas had made the Doctor comedies for the Rank Organisation, and used this as leverage to get the studio to finance other projects, such as No Love for Johnnie. Ralph Thomas later said "we made that because we wanted to make it very much. We all loved it – Betty, myself, Peter Finch."

Betty Box said she was "very surprised Rank let me do it... because they were very politically conservative as an organisation. Perhaps they liked the Peter Finch character being so corrupt because, after all, he was left-wing. I must say I liked it very much... I enjoyed making it very much. I loved working with Peter Finch. He was drunk some of the time, and not always very easy, but I was just very fond of him.

In August 1960 St John announced Rank would make fifteen films that year, down from his peak of 55 a year. "About a third will be comedies," he said. "The remainder will be dramas - some of them more frankly adult than we have ever attempted before. We must move with the times." No Love for Johnnie was expected to be Rank's first X rated movie.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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