David Puttnam won 4 Oscars and 3 BAFTAs for 'Chariots of Fire' in 1981
In a Sunday Supplement series for The Westminster Hour first broadcast in January 2006, the Oscar winning film producer David Puttnam describes how films from the post-war period reflect changing political and social attitudes.
Over three weeks he examines three very different films.
He begins with the wartime documentary "Diary for Timothy", which heralded the creation of the welfare state. The film was made by the renowned director Humphrey Jennings whose films were noted for their cinematic brilliance and emotional appeal. It is a movie which still has the power to bring tears to the eyes of some of the contributors.
In Part Two David Puttnam looks at the 1959 comedy "I'm All Right Jack", which starred Peter Sellers as a bolshie shop steward. The film was one of the first to tackle - and satirise - the worsening state of industrial relations in post-war Britain, and tapped into a collective raw nerve with its portrayal of strife between shopfloor and boardroom in the 1950s.
In the final part of his series about political cinema, "Movies with a Message", David Puttnam looks at Ken Loach's controversial 1990 film about Northern Ireland "Hidden Agenda". In the film, Loach tried to show why, in his view, the British state was rotten to the core. The film contained highly controversial allegations that the security services had plotted against the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and operated a shoot to kill policy in Northern Ireland. Needless to say, the film caused outrage at Westminster.
'Movies with a Message' was produced by Jane Ashley