Dinner at Noon (Jonathan Stedall, U.K., 1988) Bennett, in addition to being a playwright, actor, and filmmaker, is an unstoppable autobiographical essayist. Dinner at Noon captures this Proustian passion in a film essay on hotels and the people who call them home, as Bennett's family did. Watching other people leading their lives was the way his parents led theirs. In the grand couples having one more tea in a lifetime of teas, in the gentle fanatics of the North of England Horticultural Society, in the overgrown boys called businessmen, and finally, in Bennett couched embarrassedly in a corner, we see the genesis of his art. Written by Alan Bennett. (38 mins, Color, 16mm)Afternoon Off (Stephen Frears, U.K., 1979) Bennett's mordant play about an East Asian lad lost amid the inscrutable English is just the kind of material Stephen Frears cut his teeth on for My Beautiful Laundrette. Lee, a busboy in a North England hotel, off for a blind date, wanders the forlorn afternoon streets of the off-season resort with one name on his lips-Iris-and Dairy Box chocolates in hand. This innocent abroad is variously taken for a visiting delegation, a bomb-carrying Aladdin, a Buddhist, an industrial spy, and Mao Tse Tung. Après Austen, Bennett and Frears keenly observe how the English still take pride in prejudice.