The Peaches, is a British Short Film, narrated by Peter Ustinov
In 1964 the film was the British choice for the Cannes Film Festival and is a sensual, surreal fantasy about a beautiful woman and her passion for peaches. The 15-minute story, which opens with a woman splayed on a bed rubbing her face with a ripe peach is a mostly forgotten piece of British Sixties Cinema.
Directed by Michael Gill and written by Yvonne Gilan, his then wife, it stars Juliet Harmer as the Very Beautiful Girl, and is narrated by Peter Ustinov. It also features a cameo from a very young, bespectacled A.A. Gill, son of the director and writer, now the restaurant and TV critic of The Sunday Times.
The film charts the coming of age of this clever and beautiful girl and her fetish for fruit . In search of kindred spirits of like intellect, she goes to live in the city, but finds herself cleaning in the Ministry. She then falls in love, and the peaches become less important as her love grows. Bizarrely she transfers her craving to pickled onions.[1]
The film won several awards and made Michael Gill consider Hollywood. Happily, he chose to remain at the BBC, where he created the first adult educational art series and later approached Sir Kenneth Clark to make the television series Civilisation .
That the film exists at all is thanks to it gaining funding from the bfi’s Experimental Film Fund, invented by Sir Michael Balcon, maestro of Ealing Studios.