King’s Lynn and its Hollywood Ties

The "Army" Marching During Filming

In the UK market town of King’s Lynn in Norfolk, the High Street was bustling with shoppers. But just around the corner King George III’s army was marching in triumph. Shouldering their muskets, red-coated soldiers paraded their bloodied and battle scarred captives.

Nearby was the macabre sight of a body swinging from the gallows.

In the High Street it was 1985 but a stone’s throw away in King Street Hollywood had recreated the 18^th century to film Revolution, an epic about the American War of Independence starring Al Pacino. Other stars included Donald Sutherland and Natassja Kinski; it was directed by Hugh Hudson whose credits included Chariots of Fire.

The weather for filming was bitterly cold and wet. Many wore jumpers and even bin liners under their costumes.

No expense was spared; lavish sets were constructed. One local couple were paid £5,000 to have a wooden shop front constructed in front of their garage. They watched from their front window as the redcoats marched back and forth and saw a fibreglass horse ripped to shreds by an angry mob.

All this effort and disruption wound up as just a three-second scene in the film.

Local contractors were used to build the sets from local material. Hotels, shops and holiday cottages profited from the surge in population – more than a thousand extras were recruited for the film.

King’s Lynn looked forward to the spin-offs of such an epic. Surely the town would become a magnet for tourists from across the pond.

But incredibly the film flopped. It cost $28 million dollars to make but grossed only $350,000 at the box office. Even in King’s Lynn, where the film and generated such interest, only 150 people attended the first night at the local cinema.

King Street Today

Little remains in the town to remind residents what took place there during that bleak February 25 years ago. Hidden away beneath a hairdresser’s sign is a rope turning machine used by Pacino. And on a faded sign above what is now the Probation Services office you can just pick out the words P Courtland Dry Storage.

Hugh Hudson was not a happy man. Recently he wrote of the difficulties in filming during a freezing English winter with weeks of non-stop rain. He claims that Goldcrest Films pressured him into rushing the film out when it was incomplete – something that still rankles with him and Al Pacino.

In spite of all that Hudson has just released a DVD version of the film, Revolution Revisited. It has an additional voiceover recorded by Pacino last year.

Hudson wrote: “It’s his current voice which is much gruffer. It gives it an air of sadness, the feel of a wiser man looking back.”

No doubt Hugh Hudson too is wiser as he looks back.

*If you have any links with East Anglia in the UK, wartime memories, or indeed any comments, please email c/o Senior Magazine at seniormag@sbcglobal.net. Read Let’s Talk online at
www.lets talk24.co.uk.