The Insurance Man (1986)

Highly Recommended

UK

Television Film

Series Title: Screen Two (1985-1994)

Director: Richard Eyre

Writer: Alan Bennett

Cinematographer: Nat Crosby

Composer: Ilona Sekacz

Cast: Robert Hines, Daniel Day Lewis, Jim Broadbent, Vivien Pickles, Geoffrey Palmer, Tessa Wojtczak, Katy Behean, Trevor Peacock, Alan MacNaughton

A middle-aged man in Nazi-occupied Prague with a lung condition tells his doctor of how he came to work briefly in an asbestos factory thirty years earlier, telling of how a mysterious skin condition, contracted whilst working at a dye factory, had led to his meeting, after a tortuous journey through a nightmarish, uncaring world of labyrinthine corridors and bureaucracy, a kindly young Jewish insurance adjuster, named Kranz Kafka, who took pity upon him, in Alan Bennett’s strikingly photographed, brilliantly written, and consummately performed television play. Iain.Stott