The Panther Roars Again

Screengrab: British soldier (Philip Dunne, later a Tory minister) and WPC (Sarah Wright) enter a hostile Belfast pub…

A mere 47 years on, I have restored and remastered The Panther LZ , my first professional short. I found the rusting 16mm film can in my late mother Josephine’s cellar, and the “minor opus” was rescued from oblivion just in time: the reds were almost faded and optical soundtrack decayed. Half the finance for this spoof promotion for an assault rifle, which I made at 20, came from Roy and John Boulting, the great British filmmakers. As it was first mistaken for a real sales film, I had actor Kenneth Griffith do a voiceover intro. It was shot by Eran Riklis, later an eminent director. The film caught the attention of the BBC, who hired me as one of its youngest ever directors of film drama, and was awarded a British Film Institute certificate as “an outstanding film of the year”. Alive Studios did the telecine scan and Jaime Juarez remastered the sound.

Watch The Panther LZ