Tonite Let's All Make Love in London

Along with Benefit of the Doubt, Tonite Let's All Make Love in London helped to establish Peter Whitehead as a filmmaker in New York. Its depiction of the "London Scene" evoked the dual sense of fascination and construction expressed in Time magazine's April 1966 presentation of the English capital as a "Swinging City." Given the temporal proximity of the film to its subject, it is easy to initially view Tonite as an uncritical portrait. It is not overtly didactic, but through a combination of candid interviews and careful juxtaposition of sound and image it maintains an attitude of ambivalence. The audience is shown what allegedly constitutes London's "Swinging" status, but the tangible reality and essential "meaning" of this identity is seen to be largely indistinct. The following documents encapsulate this oscillation between celebration and critique. Whitehead's press release takes the form of a communiqué, a fragmented dispatch from the cultural front that formally echoes Time's framing. The complex that is "London" is reduced to a series of sound bites and resonant fragments. In the review from Variety, the film is presented as "fast paced fun," whereas for Raymond Durgnat, writing in Films and Filming, it is this presentation of ephemerality that lies at the heart of the film's foregrounding effect. This dossier ends with two letters that give an insight into the complex situation surrounding the relationship between the film and its source of funding, the National Film Finance Corporation.