Bronco Bullfrog (also known as Around Angel Lane and Ghost Squad TV 3) is a 1969 British kitchen sink teen drama film directed by Barney Platts-Mills and starring Del Walker, Ann Gooding and Sam Shepherd.
As the film opens, four youths, Del, Roy, Chris and Geoff, are seen breaking into a cafe in Stratford, East London, but they only get away with about ninepence and some cake, and it is clear that they are hardly master criminals.
In November 1970, a group of 200 members of the Beaumont Youth Club in Leyton jeered Princess Anne, with some throwing tomatoes, as she was going to see the London premiere of Three Sisters instead of Bronco Bullfrog.
[11] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Ingredients that seem perilously unpromising – aimless, episodic narrative, the inarticulacy of the characters, and a cast picked almost literally 'off the street' (though several had worked on Platt's-Mills' previous, and aptly titled, film Everybody's an Actor) – compel attention by an underplayed and miraculously non-committal realism; both less sentimental than Kes [1969] and less insistently sociological than, say, We Are the Lambeth Boys [1959]. ...
According to Platts-Mills, most of the scenes were indeed improvised – if only because the cast hadn't actually read the script – and the acting achieves in consequence an air of real spontaneity, even discovery, in which restless glances and glum silences become as illuminating as the 'dialogue' itself.
"[13] Ali Carterall and Simon Wells wrote in Your Face Here: British Cult Movies Since the Sixties: "Bronco Bullfrog is as close to pure Mod poetry as you're going to get and it's a crying shame that this masterpiece has only been seen by a handful of those in the know.