An age of deceit. A man of our times.


A writer displays a troubling streak of opportunism in his personal and professional lives in this British drama. As the Falkland Islands war rages, journalist and aspiring historical writer James Penfield (Jonathan Pryce) is working on a book that will examine the 1965 Suez crisis in a manner compatible with the current political climate. James is also pursuing Susan Barrington (Charlie Dore), a documentary filmmaker whose mother Ann (Rosemary Harris) is a noted expert on the Suez crisis and an outspoken leftist. While James has assured his publisher that his book will take a conservative view, he tells Susan and Ann that he's a socialist and that his book will reflect that position as he attempts to glean information from them. James also sleeps with Ann as his relationship with Susan hits a rough patch, but he isn't especially forgiving when he discovers that Susan has had a fling with Jeremy Hancock (Tim Curry), a tabloid journalist who has worked with both of them. The Ploughman's Lunch includes a sequence where the characters attend the 1982 Conservative Party conference, which was shot at the actual event (and includes a speech Margaret Thatcher delivered to the assembled Tories).

The Ploughman's Lunch is a 1983 film written by Ian McEwan and directed by Richard Eyre which features Jonathan Pryce, Tim Curry and Rosemary Harris.
The film looks at the media world in Margaret Thatcher's Britain during the time of the Falklands War. It was a part of Channel 4's "Film on Four" strand, enjoying a successful and critically lauded theatrical release[1][2] prior to its television screenings.

In The New York Times, film critic Vincent Canby wrote, "James Penfield, the journalist who glowers at the center of the fine new English film 'The Ploughman's Lunch,' is a fascinating variation on all of the angry, low-born young men who populated British novels and plays in the late 1950's and 60's. Although he denies it, he is angry. At one point he says: 'You do everything right and you feel nothing. Either way.' His problem is that he feels everything all too acutely, but it doesn't make him a better person, only more devious. James Penfield is Jimmy Porter of 'Look Back in Anger' updated to the 1980's, specifically to London during the 1982 Falkland war and the Tory leadership of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. 'The Ploughman's Lunch,' the first theatrical film to be written by Ian McEwan and directed by Richard Eyre, is a witty, bitter tale of duplicity and opportunism in both private and public life...This is tricky stuff, but 'The Ploughman's Lunch' blends fact with fiction with astonishing success."[3] The Daily Mail said of the work, "This is undoubtedly the most politically aware film produced in Britain since the war,"[4] adding that its "crab-like pattern traverses a huge area of British social and political life, including the media, the LSE students, the fashionable publishers – and it ends up at the justified triumphalism being celebrated by Margaret Thatcher at the Tory Party conference, where cameras smuggled into that event allowed the film actors to mingle with the political supremos of the day. No subsequent film catches so well the look and lifestyle of the early Eighties."

Release Date: October 19, 1984

Distrib: Samuel Goldwyn