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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 second collection brings together many of his most celebrated films, along with some that are ripe for rediscovery. Featured titles are Cathy Come Home (1965), Hidden Agenda (1990), Land and Freedom (1995), Carla's Song (1996), My Name is Joe (1998), Sweet Sixteen (2002), Ae Fond Kiss (2004) and The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006).
Cathy Come Home is probably the most famous British television play ever, watched by a quarter of the population on its first broadcast in 1966. Its impact was enormous, provoking questions in the Houses of Parliament and helping to launch the housing charity Shelter. Ken Loach and producer Tony Garnett also ushered in a new style of television drama, taking the cameras onto the streets and fusing documentary and drama styles to give the story an extra sense of reality, and a devastating emotional impact. A bleak and uncompromising view of how inflexible officialdom splits families and ruins lives.
In Hidden Agenda, an American lawyer is killed in Northern Ireland after failing to stop at a road block. A top-ranking police officer is called upon to investigate the circumstances surrounding his death. A taut, intriguing and exciting political thriller.
Land and Freedom is larger in scope than any previous Loach film and the Spanish Civil war sequences have a great authenticity. Jim Allen's screenplay connects the political education of Ian Hart's Liverpudlian volunteer with that of his 1990s granddaughter
Carla's Song sees Robert Carlyle's pawky Glasgow bus driver (the actor is actually driving that double-decker) wooing and winning Carla, a Nicaraguan refugee. When the couple move to Central America, Glaswegian wit cannot cope with what it encounters in a homeland subject to Contra attacks and the love story has to end - to be replaced by another one. The humour in the first half of Paul Laverty's script foreshadows that of My Name Is Joe.
In My Name is Joe, the drug addicts, dealers, and long-term unemployed are powerfully depicted in this drama set in contemporary Glasgow. Paul Laverty makes sure that humour and romance have their place in his screenplay. Peter Mullan as Joe fully merited his Cannes Best Actor award.
In Sweet Sixteen a Scottish teenager whose mother is in prison tries to raise the money for a home so that when she comes out she will be safe from the likes of her former boyfriend. An uncompromising and fiercely unsentimental slice of raw social realism that comes over like a Scottish Kes.
Ae Fond Kiss is Loach's most optimistic film to date, and asks some hard questions about religion, race and immigration in multi-cultural Britain. With insight and compassion, the film examines the culture clashes faced by second generation immigrants, to produce an intelligent and entertaining love story.
The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach's deserving Palme d'Or winner, is a searing and powerful depiction of the Irish War Of Independence, focusing on two brothers who find themselves on different sides during the conflict. Its representation of what happens when an occupying force withdraws is clearly applicable to current events, and this is a great piece of angry political cinema.
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 ra... more >
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!
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