The Breaking of Bumbo is a 1970 British comedy film directed by Andrew Sinclair and starring Richard Warwick, Joanna Lumley, Jeremy Child and Edward Fox.

Newly commissioned Guards Ensign 'Bumbo' Bailey learns the facts of life from his new girl friend in Swinging London as well as from his platoon and commanding officer.

[6]) Sinclair later said "I updated the novel so that Bumbo now has to choose between obeying orders during a civil insurrection sympathizing with the young revolutionaries.

[8] In August 1969 Bryan Forbes announced The Breaking of Bumbo as part of his initial slate for EMI Films with Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo to direct.

[13] Sinclair later said "‘I knew nothing about film directing but I had become a top screenwriter in Hollywood and I also ran a little publishing firm, producing classic screenplays in book form.

"Sophisticated people should enjoy being laughed at occasionally and a bit of fun poked at the establishment does not do any harm," said Sinclair.

Very soon you learn as an actress that you will have to do and say things which are contrary to your beliefs; but you must become the advocate for the character and your job is to inhabit the person and present her as completely as possible.

I hated taking my clothes off for bed scenes (I don’t know a soul who is happy with their gear off in front of a large crowd of strangers or, worse, friends).

If there is one thing that all people who worked with Delfont could agree on, it was that he would take the least-risky option if it meant he could avoid tarnishing his own reputation.

First we were ABC Pictures, then it was EMI, then it was EMI-MGM and this all happened on two days and the decision was taken that every single film should be scrapped and dumped as a tax loss.

I loved working with Joanna, she was totally professional, and I thought for a first- time performance in a major role she was superb.

[32]Robert Murphy wrote in Sixties British Cinema: From its opening titles it is apparent that The Breaking of Bumbo (1970) is one of David Puttnam and Alan Parker’s despised ‘red London bus movies’... As well as the ubiquitous red buses, the film’s plot seems improbable and its views of Swinging London grinding to a halt amid student demon- strators and bottle-throwing skinheads shoddily unconvincing...

The main problem, apart from Sinclair’s uncertain direction, is that Bumbo is a 1950s figure (in the novel he is a guards officer who tries to start a mutiny in protest over Suez), and the idea of transposing him to a late-60s London of demonstrations, sit-ins and student revolutionaries, ingenious though it might have looked on paper, simply doesn’t work.

In 1956 Bumbo was a precursor of those upper-middle class young men whose lives were changed by the revelation that assumptions and institutions they had been brought up to think sacred could be questioned, even laughed at.

In 1968 he merely looks like a not very bright Hooray Henry torn between the arrogant exclusiveness of life as a guards officer and the decadent temptations of Swinging London.

What might have been a powerful liberal riposte to the celebration of traditional values in Michael Powell’s The Queen’s Guards [1961] proves to be embarrassingly inconsequential.