Bronco Bullfrog - Sam Shepard

  

Bronco Bullfrog himself, played by Sam Shepard, a petty criminal idolised by the other boys, turns out to be little more than an inept and contact-less criminal who cannot sell the goods he has stolen - ‘a beefy borstal escapee’, according to Alexander Walker, ‘whose room bulges with loot from hijack jobs that he hasn’t a notion how to convert into ready cash.’

Alexander Walker, National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties (London, Harrap, 1985), p. 221

Robin Askwith, The Confessions of Robin Askwith (London, Ebury Press, 1999)

Friday 1^st May 1981

I have been offered a considerable amount of money to do 16 weeks in Jersey, UK with ‘Confessions from a Health Farm’, as a summer season. I have also been offered considerably less to appear in Lindsay Anderson’s new film, ‘Britannia Hospital’, playing the same character I played in ‘If …’.

     I phoned Lindsay up. He was most amused.

     ‘Jersey sounds interesting, Robin, what’s the play?’

     Knowing full well what the bloody play was.

     ‘Er … well, it’s ‘Confessions from a Health Farm’, actually.’

     ‘Who wrote that? I can’t remember.’

     ‘Well I did.’

‘I see … now you do know that some people shop at Harrods and some at Woolworths.’

Robin Askwith, The Confessions of Robin Askwith (London, Ebury Press, 1999), pp. 166-167

Alexander Walker on Stardust (Michael Apted, 1974)

[Stardust] acted as a purgative for the Sixties: out came all the hard home-truths in dialogue as briskly paced as it was deeply scathing. There was not a jot of sympathy for any particular devil. For this reason, and against these times, it was a much more important picture than That’ll Be the Day. The earlier film had been about innocence and temptation: this one was about manipulation and exorcism.

Alexander Walker, National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties (London, Harrap, 1985), p. 76