Walter

Review type: Video | Posted on: 26 November 2011

2011. GB. DVD. Network DVD. 238 minutes. Price: £8.99

About the author: Laura Mayne is a Doctoral Candidate and one of the Research Assistants on the ‘Channel Four Television and British Film Culture’ project (www.c4film.co.uk/), which currently being undertaken at University of Portsmouth with the collaboration of the BUFVC, looking at the impact of Film Four.

Stephen Frears’ Walter was screened on Channel 4 on 2 November 1982 and was the first feature film shown on the channel’s opening night of transmission. Based on a novel by David Cook, produced by Central Television and funded by Channel 4. The second part of the story, Walter and June, shown in 1983 and based on Cook’s subsequent novel Winter Doves, saw McKellen joined by Sarah Miles played his lover, June. Walter was designed to provoke; it was controversial and daring in its content and completely unprecedented in its use of real disabled people as characters in the story. It was nevertheless released to critical acclaim, and won first prize at the International Rehabilitation Festival, an award from the World Congress of Rehabilitation and a BAFTA for best TV music, while Walter and June also gained approval for its approach to issues of mental health.

Ian McKellen gives an astounding performance as Walter, a young man with severe learning difficulties who suffers neglect and ill-treatment …

Both films were later re-cut into one feature film for release in the USA under the title Loving Walter. Recently, both films have been re-released by Network DVD in a special two-disc set (RRP £19.99). This release contains both Walter and Walter and June as originally transmitted on Channel 4, as well as the re-cut version of Loving Walter. The original films contain important scenes which were omitted from the US release (including a particularly gruesome scene in Walter in which one patient in the mental hospital brutally attacks another while a staff member hides in a cupboard), and so viewing both films as separate entities is essential for gaining a better understanding of the films, their treatment of mental health issues and their criticisms of mental institutions.