Alan Gibson

Goodbye Gemini

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Jacki, Julian and Clive in a pub

Sometimes known as Twinsanity – a title that promises way too much – Goodbye Gemini is a peculiar British film from 1970, and is perhaps best bracketed with Performance, which came out the same year. It’s a 1960s Swinging London film with a hangover, the day after the night before, and stars Judy Geeson and Martin Potter as a pair of blond fraternal twins who arrive wide-eyed in the big city and are then plunged into a maelstrom of metropolitan hipness, where they struggle to keep their heads while everyone around them parties like it’s the end of times. Of the two of them, Julian (Potter) struggles more. Jacki (Geeson) isn’t burdened with … Read more

Lad: A Yorkshire Story

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Alan Gibson and Bretten Lord

When Dan Hartley was a lad, growing up in Yorkshire, he struck up a relationship, a friendship, with Al Boughen, a park ranger working for the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Lad: A Yorkshire Story, dedicated to Boughen, who died in 2010, is a tribute from the older Hartley, now a writer and director, to the man who mentored him at a crucial stage of his life. In Hartley’s film Dan is now called Tom and is played with real charm by Bretten Lord (bringing to mind another Yorkshire lad, David Bradley, in Ken Loach’s 1969 film Kes). Tom is a 13-year-old with a life on a familiar course – hanging with his older brother … Read more