The White Bus
The White Bus is a 1967 short film directed by Lindsay Anderson. The screenplay was jointly adapted with Shelagh Delaney from a short story in her collection "Sweetly Sings the Donkey" (1963). "The White Bus" was also the film debut of Anthony Hopkins. Plot. The main character, only referred to as 'the girl' (Patricia Healey) leaves London, goes north on a train full of football fans and takes a trip in a white double-decker bus around an unnamed city she is visiting, although it is clearly based on Manchester; Delaney was born and grew up in  nearby Salford. The Mayor (Arthur Lowe), a local businessman, and the council's ceremonial macebearer (John Sharp) happen also to be taking the trip while they show the city to visiting foreigners. Locations include Albert Square and its landmark, the Town Hall and the nearby Central Library. The 'model estate' of high-rise flats was shot on the Kersal Flats estate, while the factory sequences were shot in Trafford Park, including the Metropolitan-Vickers works. It also featured scenes on Cheetham Hill Road and inside Cheetham College (now demolished). Both the exterior and interior shots of the school were taken  in the former Pendleton High School for Girls – now mainly demolished, but with the original Victorian building converted to a retirement home. Using local people, Anderson also staged parodies of paintings by Manet ("Le déjeuner sur l'herbe"), Fragonard and Goya in Buile Hill Park in Salford. It was Anthony Hopkins film debut in a small role, while Stephen Moore is a young bowler-hatted, possibly upper-class, man who pesters the heroine with nonsense on the station in London. She may know him, as she says "I'll write" from the train. History and production. The film was originally commissioned  by producer Oscar Lewenstein, then a director of Woodfall, as one third of a 'portmanteau' feature entitled "Red White and Zero", with the other sections supplied by Anderson's Free Cinema collaborators Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz from the other short stories by Shelagh Delaney. The "first real day's shooting" was on 19 October 1965, and took about a month to complete. The two other planned sections of the film developed into what became Richardson's "Red and Blue" and Peter Brook's "Ride of the Valkyrie" (1967), Reisz having dropped out, both of which are unrelated to Delaney 's work. Of these, only "The White Bus" received a theatrical release in the UK.