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MovieMail's Review
Ken Loach is the most admired and respected UK filmmaker of his generation. Forty years of films and TV plays about ordinary people in ‘real’ social situations is a rare achievement, especially when they display a combination of genuine social comment and real human warmth. These two collections offer an excellent round-up of Loach’s recent work as well as glimpses into his early career.
All the features since 1990 are included and it is good to see The Navigators, the 2001 critique of rail privatisation (not shown in UK cinemas) sitting alongside Riff-Raff, with which it shares a focus on a group of working men suffering dangerous conditions.
The collections highlight all of Loach’s concerns, fleshed out by writers such as Barry Hines, Jim Allen and Paul Laverty. The more clearly ‘political’ films such as Land and Freedom overlap with the melodramas, both family-centred like Raining Stones and Ae Fond Kiss and more female-centred such as Ladybird, Ladybird with its courageous central performance by the club performer Chrissie Rock. Loach is often ahead of the game and Ladybird, Ladybird’s Chilean refugee character is followed by a Nicaraguan refugee in Carla’s Song and the migrant labour theme of Bread and Roses. Loach’s next film, It’s a Free World, which is showing at the Venice Film Festival this year, again has migrant labour as an issue.
Loach’s realist melodramas work so well because of his casting and direction of actors. The inclusion of both Cathy Come Home (1966) and Poor Cow (1967) offers an opportunity to enjoy performances by Carol White (the ‘working-class Julie Christie’), whose fragile beauty and vulnerability in real life is well used in the two films. Anyone only familiar with the seamless social realism of Loach’s later work might be surprised by his innovative approach in these films, which includes character voiceovers, ‘interviews’ and other devices, which portray a very different 1960s London to Hollywood-style productions.
The Gamekeeper (1980) is a fascinating Barry Hines scripted TV film offering a subtle social class analysis to put alongside Kes. It whets the appetite for Loach’s great 1960s and 70s television work. Start clamouring for Collection 3 now!
South Bank Show documentary (1993) with Ken Loach interviewed about his career to date.
Film Description
Ken Loach is a name synonymous with British cinema; a director that has continued to challenge his audience's perception of film form and never ceased to surprise. This collection brings together many of his most celebrated films, along with some that are ripe for rediscovery. Featured titles are Poor Cow (1967), Kes (1969), The Gamekeeper (1980), Riff Raff (1990), Raining Stones (1993), Ladybird Ladybird (1994), Bread and Roses (2000) and The Navigators (2001).
Poor Cow is a combination of Wednesday Play realism and commercial "Swinging London" movie, and contains elements which were to become basics of Loach's method. Carol White's performance forms the real heart of the film.
Probably still Loach's best-known and best-loved film, Kes was adapted from the Barry Hines novel A Kestrel for a Knave. The portrait of northern working class life remains as pertinent and fiercely unsentimental almost 30 years on, and everyone remembers the famous football games sequence with the late lamented Brian Glover hilariously impersonating Bobby Charlton. A true classic of postwar British cinema.
The Gamekeeper, like Kes, is based on a novel from Barry Hines, and follows a year in the life of a gamekeeper, from rearing birds and dealing with predators to organising the shoot.
Witty and naturalistic, Riff-Raff had strong messages for workers in Thatcher's Britain: drugs, daydreams and horoscope escapisms are out, mutual support and retaliation, in! There are vintage Robert Carlyle and Ricky Tomlinson roles, plus an unforgettable foreman who sees laziness everywhere except in his own tea-leaves.
Raining Stones reflects Loach's unwavering left-wing sympathies and has a truly satisfactory ending as life dishes out justice for a change! Ricky Tomlinson is on form together with Bruce Jones (Coronation Street's Les Battersby) as they wrestle with sheep, drains, loan sharks and poverty.
Ladybird Ladybird is an intense drama in which a woman fights with the social services over the care of her children.
In Bread and Roses, sisters Maya and Rosa are Mexican immigrant cleaners who work in L.A., earn a pittance and get treated like dogs. A young activist offers hope when he vows to help them get the justice and dignity they deserve. Inspired by the real life 'Justice for Janitors' campaign.
The Navigators, one of Ken Loach's most accessible and poignant films, follows the fortunes of a group of track workers as the privatisation of British Rail takes effect. When the workers get their new working brief, the company's 'Mission Statement', the talk of 'performance-related pay' and unpaid holidays seem like a joke. Before long though, the workers are forced to make a very clear 'choice' to take their chances with the redundancy pay-off and life as casual agency workers, or toe the line and work for the new company under new rules. Forced to cut corners, a tragic accident seems inevitable.
