Old Yorker

  • Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Louise Osmond (2016)

    The most voluble talking head in the first part of Versus is Tony Garnett.  He met Ken Loach in 1964, as a cast member in a piece the latter was directing.  He switched from acting to become the producer of most of Loach’s best-known television drama.  Garnett describes the exclusion of working-class voices from television drama – writing, directing and acting voices – until a more enlightened BBC regime started to open things up in the mid-1960s, and he and Loach were given Wednesday Play commissions.  Louise Osmond allows what Garnett says to pass, without clarification, contradiction or contextualisation – so that Up the Junction, based on Nell Dunn’s 1963 book of the same name and the first Loach-Garnett collaboration to make a big impression, can be presented as radically and entirely new.  It isn’t explained, for example, whether Garnett and Loach were alone in receiving this kind of commission for the Wednesday Play or that the slot developed under the aegis of Sydney Newman, recruited as Head of Drama by the BBC in 1962.  (This followed Newman’s pioneering work for ABC, between 1958 and 1962, on Armchair Theatre, which had, in the words of Wikipedia, ‘tackled many difficult and socially relevant subjects in the then-popular “kitchen sink” style, and still managed to gain a mass audience on the ITV network’.)  It isn’t acknowledged that Z-Cars had begun on the BBC in 1962 (or that Ken Loach directed several episodes of the series in 1964).  There’s no suggestion of the new social inclusivity that had been seen in recent years in other popular arts – nothing about what was happening in pop music, or Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, or books (like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner) and plays (A Taste of Honey, A Kind of Loving) that gained attention, won praise and were turned into successful films.  Tony Garnett’s idea of a working-class actor is someone who doesn’t talk posh.  It’s not clear, when he deplores the absence of such voices in TV drama writing and directing, if working-class is a description of socio-economic grouping or political allegiance.

    Louise Osmond might argue that she didn’t have time for this kind of information and explanation but it’s soon evident that she hadn’t the political inclination either.  (One might have guessed this from  her previous – and superior – film, Dark Horse.)  In Ken Loach’s manicheistic world, there are two opposing forces, capital and labour.  Osmond, as her film’s title suggests, evidently sees it as her duty to place the interviews in Versus in a black-and-white context that vindicates Loach’s perspective.  There’s a strong (fishy) whiff of this from the start.  Legends on the screen explain that Loach announced his retirement from film-making in 2013.   In May 2015, the Conservatives, in Osmond’s editorialising phrase, ‘sweep back to power’.  Loach is so incensed by the new government’s welfare cuts that he returns to the fray to make I, Daniel Blake. By 22 July 2015, he and the film’s producer, Rebecca O’Brien, are scouting locations in Newcastle and the shooting schedule is set to begin on 5 October.   This is remarkably quick work – especially in view of what O’Brien says about Channel 4 declining to support the project before BBC Films agreed to put money in.  Even if the chronology is accurate, you wonder why the welfare cuts during the previous five years of the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition didn’t delay Ken Loach’s retirement.  In fact, the Guardian was reporting as early as May 2014, as the supposed swansong Jimmy’s Hall was about to screen at Cannes, that reports of Ken Loach’s ‘retirement as a director of fiction appear to have been greatly exaggerated’.  The connection between his change of heart and the General Election result in 2015 is, in other words, spurious.  Louise Osmond has quickly made clear that – taking a leaf out of Loach’s book – she isn’t going to let inconvenient facts get in the way of the politically emotive effect she’s after.

    Cathy Come Home, written by Jeremy Sandford (Nell Dunn’s husband at the time) and screened as a Wednesday Play in November 1966, had considerable immediate impact.  In Versus, Tony Garnett describes his and Loach’s meeting subsequently with ‘the Minister’ for whom a special screening of the film was arranged.  The conversation ended, Garnett says, with the Minister shrugging his shoulders and saying of the housing crisis, ‘But, after all, what can one do?’  The Minister of Housing and Local Government at the time was Tony Greenwood, who, in 1961, had been ready to contest the Labour Party leadership contest as a leftist opponent to Hugh Gaitskell.  Garnett’s characterisation of the unnamed minister as a generic, languidly callous establishment figure might therefore seem surprising – though not if seen through a retrospective lens of disenchantment with Labour as a political force for good.  A bit later in the film, Garnett explains that disillusion with the Wilson government of the late 1960s set in while he and Loach were making Kes (how long was the shoot?)  According to Versus, Loach, by the end of the decade, regarded the Labour Party as a betrayer of the working class – although he remained a member of the Party until the mid-1990s.  (He joined Respect for a few years but is no longer linked to them either.)

    Ken Loach doesn’t see his political isolation as any kind of disadvantage.  His intransigence rather enables him to pick fights even with those who might seem broadly sympathetic with his outlook – though ‘broadly sympathetic’ is, to him, a contradiction in terms.  If people aren’t for Loach, they’re against him; if he doesn’t get his own way, those who deny him are impugned as perfidious cowards.   You might have expected the Thatcher years to have given new opportunities to an anti-capitalist film-maker as much as to council house tenants and get-rich-quick merchants.  In the event, the 1980s were a lean period for Loach.  Versus presents the decade as one of serial treachery – on the part of those who commissioned work from him but, when they didn’t like what they saw, refused to let others see it.  First Channel 4, then Melvyn Bragg and the South Bank Show, then Max Stafford-Clark at the Royal Court Theatre.  Jim Allen’s play Perdition, which Loach was to direct at the Royal Court, was a significant early project in the latter’s ‘anti-Zionist’ CV.  (The inverted commas are an acknowledgement that some would see his activism as anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic.)  Stafford-Clark, who pulled the plug on the production thirty-six hours before its first scheduled performance, rather winningly admits to making two mistakes with Perdition:  ‘the first was to decide to put it on, the second was to decide to take it off’.    Loach won’t have it:  these weren’t ‘mistakes’, he says, but a failure of ‘integrity’ – in effect vindicating Stafford-Clark’s claim that ‘Ken had an inflexible set of principles that couldn’t be questioned’.

    A more important question of separation – one which Louise Osmond ignores – concerns the distance between Ken Loach and the have-nots on whose behalf he speaks through film.  Versus includes a clip from a 1960s BBC television discussion of Cathy Come Home, hosted by Cliff Michelmore.  (Tony Garnett is on the discussion panel.)  Michelmore asks the studio audience how many of them are aware of Cathy Come Home and around ninety per cent are.  While it’s impossible to know the demographic of this audience, it’s improbable that one per cent of working-class people today will be aware of Ken Loach’s work for cinema.  (I don’t like using the term ‘working-class’ in this crude way but I think it’s fair enough, since Loach appears to see the working class as an undifferentiated entity.)  Does the inaccessibility of those he represents matter to him?  I’d guess not much, for two main reasons.  First, if working-class viewers have switched off from politically provocative or challenging plays and films, Loach will see this as the fault – indeed, as the intention – of a brainwashing, resistance-lowering Establishment, and will feel his approach is all the more justified.  Second, I suspect that he feels being cut off from the cultural mainstream helps keep his work pure.  Osmond also ignores the matter of the dramatic or comic quality of Loach’s films, and whether he ever struggles to reconcile their polemical nature with other factors.  He talks in Versus about the importance of bringing out the ‘humanity of people’; anyone who has seen a reasonable number of his movies will know that he’s interested in showing people’s humanity only when they’re (to him) the right sort of people.  I think this is a serious limitation – even in terms of making a convincing political statement.  His work often does have artistic merit but I’d have liked Louise Osmond to press Loach on this, if only to hear him condemn criticism of his films on artistic grounds as proof merely of a lack of political engagement on the part of the critic.

    The actors who appear in Versus all express great admiration for Loach.  They include people like Gabriel Byrne and Cillian Murphy, whose careers were already well underway when they first worked with him; and people ‘discovered’ by Loach, such as David (Dai) Bradley (Kes) and Crissy Rock (Ladybird Ladybird).  While Byrne and Murphy were impressed by Loach and the latter was particularly grateful for influencing his approach to acting, the Loach discoveries didn’t go on to sustained success.  It’s worth noting too that, with a few exceptions, Loach doesn’t tend to use the same actor more than once.  Neither of these things is surprising.  Loach claims to be searching for ‘truthful’ performances but he doesn’t really want actors in the usual sense.  He wants a person who seems right for the particular character he has in mind and who can express their personality on camera.  Once they’ve done so, they’ve served their purpose.  The interview with Dai Bradley reveals a more shocking aspect to Loach’s exploitative nature as a director.   Kes includes a scene in which several schoolboys, including Bradley’s Billy Casper, line up to have the palms of their hands caned by the headmaster.  Bradley describes how he and the others stood there, expecting that, when the moment came, the actor playing (actually overplaying) the headmaster would pretend to hit them.  He didn’t pretend and we see the unarguably truthful reactions of the children.  The struggle of the youngest boy to hold back tears is especially eloquent.  To ensure the sequence builds to a big finish, he is the last to be punished.

    Loach met his future wife Lesley when both were working as theatre actors.  She describes him, affectionately, as someone whose brain worked a little faster than his instincts and got in the way of a fully natural performance – ‘the sort of actor,’ she admits, ‘he would never employ’.  The couple have been married for fifty-four years and have had five children; and the brief insights into Loach’s family life provide rare moments of warmth and human vulnerability in Versus.   There are good-humoured contributions from, as well as his wife, their two sons and two daughters – one of whom laughs about her father’s penchant for camp musicals.   It’s a relief when Loach himself talks sheepishly about directing commercials – including one for McDonald’s – while times were hard in the late 1980s.  (This is a stunning truth-is-stranger-than-fiction illustration of the moral miasma of Thatcher’s Britain.)  He has since made two presumably expiatory McLibel documentaries.

    Ken Loach is affecting when he describes the road accident, in 1970, in which his wife was seriously injured and their five-year-old son was killed.  Elsewhere, he’s strikingly unable – or unwilling – to convey how he felt about things at the time of experiencing them.  He describes childhood holidays in Blackpool with his parents.  He remembers the variety shows there and how audiences, including his undemonstrative father, wept with laughter at the ‘wonderful’ comedians; but you don’t get much sense that Loach himself enjoyed the shows – only that he admired ‘the humour of poverty, the humour of bodily functions’ on which the comedy depended.  (It’s not as if he was a precocious political intelligence:  he ruefully recalls standing as the Tory candidate in a school election to coincide with the General Election of 1950, when he was fourteen years old.)  Whereas photographs and the testimony of others suggest that Loach had fun in OUDS, he remembers Oxford for the public school boys whose rule-the-world arrogance shaped his own political views.  He’s described by Tony Garnett as mild-mannered and it’s true that his innocuous, slightly eccentric appearance and quiet voice are initially deceptive.  It doesn’t take long, though, to see and hear something harder.

    Versus was released in Britain a few days after I, Daniel Blake (to general surprise) won Ken Loach his second Palme d’Or at Cannes.  This must have increased interest in Louise Osmond’s film and it is in some ways a fitting tribute.   It has a prevailing reverent-cum-elegiac tone (with music by Roger Goula Sarda to match).  It’s as stubbornly selective and self-righteous as the man himself seems to be.  (The same goes for Tony Garnett.  He’s plainly delighted with himself as he recalls repeatedly fooling the BBC into believing that his and Loach’s latest political-hot-potato was innocuous stuff.  Then, when it suits, Garnett deplores the Corporation’s increasingly intolerable interference.)  Alan Parker turns up to praise Loach for continuing to make films in Britain when Parker himself and other contemporaries were fleeing to Hollywood:  Osmond flashes up posters for Carry On Abroad, Confessions of a Window Cleaner and a Christopher Lee Dracula movie, to make clear how impossible it was to make creatively ambitious pictures within the British film world of the 1970s.  (There’s no mention of, for example, Deep End or Walkabout or Don’t Look Now or O Lucky Man!)  Right at the end of Versus, Parker reappears to liken Loach to ‘Marlon Brando in Rebel Without a Cause … when they ask what he’s rebelling against and he says “What have you got?”’ Parker couldn’t be more wrong – and not just because of his embarrassing mix-up between Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One:   Loach’s political outlook and targets are clear and have stayed pretty well the same for the best part of half a century.  (That’s part of what’s wrong with them.)  Paul Laverty, who has written the screenplays for all his non-documentary features since Sweet Sixteen (2002), reminds us that, even in lighter-hearted films like Looking for Eric and The Angels’ Share, the director’s socialist convictions are there – but ‘like an iceberg, with just one tenth above the water’.  I wish Ken Loach, who celebrates his eightieth birthday this month, had made more of these politically submarine movies.

    14 June 2016

  • The Leather Boys

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sidney J Furie (1964)

    Sidney J Furie already knew his way around British youth culture of a kind but The Young Ones (1961) hardly prepares you for this.  (Furie directed another Cliff Richard film, Wonderful Life, released in the same year as The Leather Boys.)  Nearly half a century on, this story of London motor-bikers stands up as a strong piece of drama, although it’s fascinating for reasons largely linked to the passage of time.  The locations and details supply a rich social record (a hoarding advertising Watney’s Pale Ale particularly took my eye).   When the young marrieds Dot and Reggie go into the Ace Cafe (a real place in North London), where the bikers and their girls congregate, she orders two teas and the waitress automatically turns to him for the money; at home in their tiny flat, Reggie’s peremptory demands for meals on time now seem outrageous.  At the heart of the story, however, is another relationship – the one between Reggie and another leather boy, Pete.

    It soon becomes clear that Pete is queer but Reggie’s sexuality remains opaque.  This, according to Wikipedia, is a significant change from the source material – a 1961 novel of the same name by Gillian Freeman – in which the two men become a homosexual couple.  No doubt it was caution that caused the film-makers to modify the book’s central theme – Freeman also wrote the screenplay – but what’s so interesting about The Leather Boys is that this timid approach makes the film more suggestive, especially in retrospect.  When Reggie splits from Dot and goes back to live at his gran’s house, Pete becomes a lodger and they share not just a room but a double bed.  I doubt that two working-class boys sleeping together in the early 1960s necessarily signified what it virtually has to signify now.  (Increased sexual enlightenment and liberation may mean that two people of the same sex are more constrained about sharing a bed today than they were in the dark ages.)   As far as we see, Reggie and Pete don’t exchange any physical affection in bed.  What we do see is that, as a consequence, the sleeping arrangements can be sustained because Reggie needn’t worry and Pete is getting something out of their spending each night together (albeit less than he wants).

    The centrality of the men’s relationship is also obscured by the casting.  Dot is played by Rita Tushingham and, because she’s by some way the biggest name in the film, we tend to assume the main story will be Dot’s short-lived marriage to Reggie.   When they’re on honeymoon at Butlin’s in Bognor, Reggie wants to do nothing but have sex with Dot; once we pick up their lives a few months later, he won’t touch her and it’s she who’s the frustrated one.   I guess in the novel this is a clear signpost; retaining it in the screenplay without confirming Reggie’s homosexuality may amount to a loss of nerve yet it creates an indefiniteness that’s preferable to neatness.  When Reggie and Pete go on a trip to Brighton they pick up a couple of girls. Reggie’s eager to do this; it’s obviously not what Pete had in mind and the encounter doesn’t lead anywhere.  This too could be seen as a weakness in the script but that’s not how you experience this non-event.   You experience rather a renewed sense of Reggie’s mixture of restlessness and inertia – the same two qualities, both suggesting discontent without pinpointing the cause of it, which were hinted at in the scenes of him and Dot in their Butlin’s chalet.  The lighting in the chalet seems to get darker and the atmosphere there certainly does:  Sidney Furie and the DoP Gerald Gibbs manage to get across in these sequences a sense of sexual uncertainty and an accompanying unhappy bafflement on Reggie’s part that feels highly expressive of the time.

    Colin Campbell makes Reggie touching because he suggests, without condescension, a young man who’s not very bright.   Campbell doesn’t show a wide range and it’s no surprise he didn’t go on to great things (perhaps his best-known role subsequently was in the highly successful ITV drama of the early 1970s, A Family at War).  But he’s highly effective here:   Reggie may be slow on the uptake and unsure of his feelings but Campbell also shows how he’s naturally, immediately drawn to the warmth of different kinds of affection – from Dot, from Pete, from his gran (beautifully played by Gladys Henson).  You root for Reggie all the way through, even when he’s bawling out Dot for not getting his tea on the table.  As Pete, Dudley Sutton seems bad at first, veering from one accent to another as if he’s trying out different ideas for doing the part.   But the upside of this is an emotional variety and edge and Sutton’s protean quality begins to make sense:  he creates a character who can – has to – get by in different environments:  in his temporary labouring job, down at the Ace Cafe, making Reggie and his gran laugh with his theatricality and humour; in the gay dockside pub in the closing scenes of the film, where Reggie finally understands Pete’s sexuality and walks away.  (This closing image, although striking enough, is clichéd – and doesn’t make a lot of sense.  I asked Sally where she thought Reggie was heading and she thought it was anywhere, as long as this was in the opposite direction from Pete.  I guess that is what we’re meant to think but, since Reggie can go straight back to his room at his gran’s, the decisive march towards camera with Pete’s figure receding at the back of the frame doesn’t really amount to much.)

    Rita Tushingham’s acting is out of kilter with what Campbell and Sutton are doing.   Either she or Sidney Furie or both of them appear to see it as obligatory that she gives A Performance to an extent not expected of the lesser lights.  Tushingham’s facial eccentricity holds your attention but she defines Dot in a busy, mannered way.  (She’s better in her quieter moments and perhaps best in her silent ones.)  On a competitive bike ride to and from Edinburgh (with a few shots of the Mound), Reggie and Dot are reconciled:  he began the journey with Pete and she with another biker (Johnny Briggs) but Reggie and Dot return together.   When they get back, well after the others, to the Ace Cafe, Pete ambushes Reggie but the night they spend together – with Reggie in an armchair – is their last.   Reggie goes to the flat intending to make a fresh start with Dot.  He finds the man she started the Edinburgh trip with in her bed.   The outcome is obvious but the sequence of events leading to it gives a rather scary idea of how Dot’s mind and emotions work.  She thought she was going to get back with Reggie, then Pete whisked him off; although Reggie seemed a bit reluctant to go, Dot decides she must have got it wrong so she resumes with the other man instead.  Simple as that.  The sense that Rita Tushingham is doing a (self-conscious) turn has the effect of making the early spats between Dot and Reggie lightweight.  When the rows get more serious, you can’t work out how things got to this point.  This feeling of puzzlement gives the relationship’s trajectory a more lifelike quality.

    I don’t mean to suggest that The Leather Boys is merely a series of happy accidents.  Furie consistently gets a good rhythm between the actors, even if Tushingham’s playing sometimes halts it.   He stages the rows between two people better than ones involving more than two.  (An argy-bargy outside an old people’s home involving Reggie and Dot and several members of Reggie’s family, as they make unsuccessful attempts to try and put his grandmother in it, is particularly crude.)   But it’s the scenes without cross words but full of tensions you can’t always fathom that are especially strong.  Furie also shows fine judgment in conveying how the bikes give the boys a more stimulating life and identity but this isn’t overdone – it’s part of the film’s texture rather than a foreground theme.   At the same time, the road sequences impart excitement and danger.  And Gillian Freeman writes excellent realistic dialogue, most subtly in the early scenes between Dot and Reggie, with the repetitions in what they say hinting at the possibility of suffocating routine ahead.  (Freeman must have had a thing about leathers:  four years later, she also worked on the screenplay for Jack Cardiff’s The Girl on a Motorcycle.)

    21 February 2012

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