Privilege

The feature debut of director Peter Watkins, whose devastating anti-war short "The War Game" was banned in Britain and awarded an Oscar in the United States, turned out to be equally polarizing. Shot as a fake documentary, complete with the dispassionate, characterless voice-of-authority narrator, this 1967 social satire profiles a pop icon (played by Manfred Mann lead singer Paul Jones) controlled by a totalitarian government that uses him to shill policy, products and even religion ("We need no longer have any disturbing political differences when we are all of one faith and believe in one God and one flag"). Watkins doesn't bother with subtlety (a massive Catholic revival resembles the Nuremberg Rally), but he finds a strange, almost Christ-like figure in the passive Jones, who opens the film with a stage act of public suffering and torment. The church, no surprise, railed against the film. British supermodel Jean Shrimpton co-stars. The disc features "Lonely Boy," a 1962 short about the hysteria around pop star Paul Anka, and a 40-page booklet among its supplements.