The Optimists of Nine Elms

A retired entertainer makes his living as a street musician in the streets of London. Two children make a friend of him and the man’s colourless life brightens a little. The film does not present that friendship as a rescue; it tells of three people who need each other. The home conditions of the children and the state of the neighbourhood lie in the ground of the account. A working class district being pulled down is where the story takes place. The daily reality of busking, the permissions, the money and the weather, is inside the film. The distance between the old man’s life on stage in the past and his condition now is the real subject. Peter Sellers takes the lead in Anthony Simmons’s hundred and ten minute British film, completed in 1973.