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Swinging London, pulverized: "Oh it's a scourge here!" The opening feint is on the New Wave of Schlesinger and Richardson, the heroine (Carol White) and her bloke (Ray Brooks) meet in a larky montage set to "Stand by Me." The lovebirds start with a sturdy home but spiral as their brood expands, Ken Loach turns the BBC handheld camera on the collisions of character, shouting fits and teary ruptures that turn the vibrant hitchhiker of the first scene into the bereft wreck of the last. Courtship, marriage, parenthood in "a blooming old system," from overcrowded tenements to caravans in rubbish dumps to derelict hostels. The city slums are laid out with bladelike journalistic technique, heightened grain and 16mm tremors for the candid mélange of actors and nonprofessionals. Disembodied thoughts, laments, platitudes and statistics ("There are 200 thousand more families in the London area than there are homes to put them in") clash in a furious soundscape, a dour corrective to Lester's whimsical Greek chorus in The Knack... and How to Get It. The old landlady's bare funeral, the barricaded door that won't halt eviction, the gypsy trailer burned down by concerned citizens. Stubborn spirits within collapsing structures (cf. Ray's Knock on Any Door), "casualties of the welfare state" and the machinery that grinds them down. "All the events in this film took place in Britain within the last eighteen months." Traffic noises score the void of the last close-up, Loach goes beyond denunciation straight to a call to arms. With Winfred Dennis, Emmett Hennessy, Wally Patch, Adrienne Frame, and Geoffrey Palmer. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |