80,000 Suspects

Bath on film! Following the recent sell-out screening, FilmBath and Off the Wall Films are getting together to present a follow-up screening of 80,000 SUSPECTS at Widcombe Social Club on Sunday 28th July.

Richard Johnson and Claire Bloom star as a doctor and nurse couple undergoing a marital crisis while striving to minimise the outbreak of a smallpox epidemic in the city of – yes - Bath! As the desperate race to track down potential spreaders of the infection and the pair’s disintegrating relationship racks up the melodrama, you’ll be watching amazed as the most comprehensive portrayal of our fair city ever committed to film dominates the screen. Here is a Bath before the widespread demolition of many of its Georgian terraces, and before the black grime was removed from the facades of those that survived, a Bath where you could blithely park your car alongside the colonnade on Stall Street, a Bath where people flung themselves with abandon into the Roman baths! Filmed during the once-in-a-century winter of 1963, and at a time when even doctors smoked like chimneys, this is a must-see for anyone familiar with the city – several of those who were recruited as extras on the shoot are still around to tell the tale.

Plus: a short film AUDREY by Tashan Bahar, whose grandmother Audrey Swindells was instrumental, with her husband Harold, in setting up in 1979 the now sadly closed Bath Postal Museum.