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Documentary childbirth footage announces the vérité aim, a rebuke of Gilbert's Alfie to preface the rebuke of Schlesinger's Darling. The London blonde (Carol White) is married to "a right bastard" (John Bindon), she serves snacks while he and his cronies casually plan the details of a robbery, an abrupt cut gives the police tumult following the botched job. From one thief to another (Terence Stamp), a soulful troubadour when he feels like it. Picnic in Wales, spilled stew and waterfall embraces before jail, a toddler's gaze on the sidelines. "Let him be happy while he's young. It's bleedin' horrible when you're grown up." Aside from intertitles and pop-tune collages, Ken Loach's first feature finds his brand of reformist grit already fully formed. Vignettes of a bird, housewife to barmaid to model to mistress and back. A hooking aunt (Queenie Watts) to shack up with, a gal pal (Kate Williams) to share a roomful of sweaty photographers, a tyke to ruin the precious bouffant. Overheard pub chatter ("I agree in principle that there's a crisis in England..."), signs in a Ruislip park ("Feeling hungry? Jesus said... I am the Bread of Life"). "I need different men to satisfy my different moods," among them the rich bloke who'd rather pull the heroine into his bathtub than hear about her elocution classes. Red Desert (fuzzy profile with belching smokestacks in the distance), Masculin Féminin (close-up musings to unseen interviewer at the end), a cold day at the beach and a sharp overhead view of a battered courtyard crisscrossed with clotheslines. "Be not too hard for life is short," sings Donovan on the soundtrack, "and nothing is given to man." Soderbergh helps himself to Stamp for the splintered séance of The Limey. With Billy Murray, Ken Campbell, Gladys Dawson, Tony Selby, and Anna Karen.
--- Fernando F. Croce |