Poor Cow
Ken Loach (1967)
The opening titles are accompanied by Donovan, singing a gentle melody that he wrote, to words by Christopher Logue:
‘Be not too hard for life is short
And nothing is given to man
Be not too hard when he is sold or bought
For he must manage as best he can’
Over the decades, Ken Loach often has been hard on the people in his films. If, for example, they’re employees of an authoritarian institution, Loach tends to depict them purely as its representatives and deny them any redeeming individuality. But in this, his first feature for cinema, he follows Donovan’s recommendation. Viewed in the context of this director’s later work, Poor Cow is surprising in other ways too. In spite of the title and a heroine whose name is Joy (the former makes you think the latter will be ironic), the story is far from unrelieved misery. It begins with Joy (Carol White) giving birth: the sequence brings out, as well as the pain involved, the delight that results. Although the main locations are working-class homes and haunts in London, scenes also take place in less familiar Loach settings: a camping holiday in the Welsh countryside; a swish bachelor pad; a photo shoot for a girly calendar.
Joy is married to Tom (John Bindon). They enjoy a decent standard of living thanks to the proceeds of his robberies. After a job goes wrong and Tom gets a four-year prison sentence, Joy and the couple’s baby son Johnny are forced to leave their home in Ruislip and move in temporarily with Joy’s Auntie Emm (Queenie Watts) in the East End. Joy then takes up with Dave (Terence Stamp), also a professional thief and Tom’s former associate. Dave lives in a shabby flat but is otherwise a big change for the better. Whereas Tom abused Joy, physically and mentally, Dave is kind and sensitive towards her and to Johnny. The romantic idyll ends abruptly, when Dave too goes to prison – for twelve years. Joy moves back to Auntie Emm’s and gets work as a barmaid. Earlier in the story, Emm shocks Joy by revealing that, when she can’t afford to pay her rent, she has sex with the landlord. Joy still loves Dave and keeps writing letters to tell him so but she now drifts into selling her body, with the encouragement of Beryl (Kate Williams), who works with her at the pub. A session where the two of them pose for a seedy group of photographers is a prelude to Joy becoming a part-time sex worker. She also starts divorce proceedings but Tom comes out of prison before these get far. The old, abusive domestic order is restored. At the end of Poor Cow, Joy is still with Tom and still dreaming of happiness with Dave, in the far from near future.
The film is based on a novel, also published in 1967, by Nell Dunn, who co-wrote the screenplay with Loach. The narrative framework keeps changing, as if they’re trying out different possibilities and unable to decide between them. At first, the action is punctuated by chapter headings and what seem to be quotes from Joy, which appear as text on the screen. Then Carol White reads in voiceover extracts from Joy’s letters to Dave in prison. In the closing stages, the voiceover expresses Joy’s feelings about what has happened to her – observations finally revealed by the camera to be what she’s saying to an unidentified interviewer. So Joy ends up looking like the subject of a documentary being made about her life. This doesn’t quite fit with what’s gone before, although Poor Cow has included plenty of quasi-documentary sequences – kids playing among the rubble of houses bombed in World War II, people on a day at the seaside. The film occasionally seems under-dramatised but the avoidance of melodramatic resolution is welcome – in Joy’s relationships with both Tom and Dave, and especially in a distressing episode, near the end, when Johnny (Stephen King) goes missing but Joy finds him on a demolition site, unharmed.
Ken Loach shows incisively but without censure how a life of crime is normal life for the main characters, especially in the prelude to and aftermath of the robbery that lands Dave in prison. He has a bath (it’s a tin bath) before going out to do the job, telling Joy he shouldn’t be back too late. When he returns, she’s in bed, where she tries on and enthuses about pieces of jewellery that he’s nicked. Dave mentions that the old woman whose house was burgled and who the gang expected to be away for the weekend, was actually at home: the gang had to lock her in a cupboard but ‘we made her a cup of tea before we left’. (The account given by the judge (Gerald Young) at Dave’s trial is rather different: a blow to the old woman’s skull has left her almost blind.) Later on, Joy expresses sentimental regret at how unfair it seems, given their fondness for each other, that she and Dave have been separated. Loach’s resistance of obvious judgments is thoroughgoing. Joy sees no contradiction in continuing to be devoted to Dave while having relationships with other men. Tom’s violence towards her is, for him, a matter of domestic routine, and more shocking for that. The photographers getting Beryl and Joy to expose more bare flesh supply not just a male gaze but a male ogle yet this isn’t overdone. Here too, restraint delivers stronger impact.
The cast is a fascinating mix. John Bindon, who’d repeatedly been in trouble with the law as a teenager, went on from Poor Cow to other acting roles (usually thugs) but his future criminal career was a bigger deal: this can’t fail to give his portrait of Tom, in retrospect, an extra layer of credibility. Carol White had starred in Loach’s celebrated Wednesday Play dramas Up the Junction (also based on Nell Dunn material) and Cathy Come Home (written by Dunn’s then-husband Jeremy Sandford). You wonder at first if White’s beauty is going to be a problem. Joy describes herself as ‘hard’-looking, which White isn’t. In contrast, Kate Williams, who’s excellent as Beryl, has a natural hardness capable of transforming into something prettier. Yet White proves herself an actress good enough to achieve the reverse. Her playing is admirably relaxed and she makes you root for Joy.
The choice of Terence Stamp for Dave is doubly surprising. First, he was already a fully-fledged international star (Far from the Madding Crowd appeared the same year as Poor Cow and Theorem the year after). Second, the script suggests that Dave, who envies the muscly legs of the footballers whose photographs decorate a wall in his flat, is no oil painting and low on self-confidence: at the time, Stamp himself was a pin-up on bedroom walls. One thinks of Ken Loach as avoiding big-name actors like the plague but perhaps he wasn’t so averse early in his career: Ray Brooks had just made The Knack … when Loach cast him opposite Carol White in Cathy Come Home. The casting of Terence Stamp turns out to be an almost complete success. He adapts easily to the naturalistic playing of Carol White and others. He’s particularly convincing on the holiday sequence in Wales and in his scenes with Joy’s little boy. Stamp gets inside his character’s tentativeness and gradual overcoming of it. He conveys a niceness that makes Dave’s amoral side all the more startling. The actor’s handsomeness works at a different level, serving to express how Dave is for Joy something of a dream come true. He still looks a bit too good when she visits him in jail, though.
The Donovan compositions and the succession of pop songs heard playing on the radio etc are complementary. It’s refreshing, at this distance in time, to experience 1967 pop being used in an actually contemporary film, rather than imposed on the soundtrack of a later one. There’s the occasional cheap shot at a ‘posh’ character – as when Joy asks her odd, awkward solicitor (Ellis Dale) if he’s married and he says no, he lives with his mother. There’s an implication throughout that Joy’s life is wholly determined by her social circumstances – which is arguable, to put it mildly. (Dave proves she has access to men who aren’t wifebeaters, even though he’s harder on rich old ladies. Joy could even have settled down with a non-criminal.). The underlying political viewpoint isn’t intrusive, however. In the mid-1990s Ken Loach described Poor Cow as ‘immature’. It just goes to show that ripeness isn’t all. This is one of his most appealing and engaging films.
23 September 2018