Barry Hines’s novel A Kestrel for a Knave provided the source material for the film that put director Ken Loach on the map: Kes (1969). With Looks and Smiles, Loach kept Hines’s title. (Hines also wrote the script, which won a prize at Cannes.) This film goes way beyond what Loach and Hines achieved with […]
Tag Archives: Ken Loach
I may have dreamt this, but I seem to recall the graffiti “CLASS WAR,” or possibly “CLASS STRUGGLE,” scrawled on the side of a building that Steve (wonderful Robert Carlyle, departing his twenties), a London construction worker from Glasgow, passes by in the course of Ken Loach’s affecting Riff-Raff. Power does not belong to laborers […]
Living meagerly in Glasgow in 1987, dancing for coins in the street, Nicaraguan exile Carla has attempted suicide already; her memories of war back home are unendurable. Bus driver George Lennox falls in love with her, loses his job in pursuit of her, takes care of her after she again tries to kill herself; but […]
Ken Loach has made the most powerful English-language films about struggling working-class lives of the past twenty years, and scenarist Paul Laverty has proven his ideal collaborator. My Name Is Joe, a case in point, is a tragicomedy of sledge-hammer force. It makes its steady way to an outcome of comradery and irreversible sacrifice that […]
Billy Casper, a wee 15-year-old with a spent, defeated face, reflects the struggle and hopelessness of Barnsley, a slum in Yorkshire in northern England. Billy arrives at school exhausted after delivering newspapers for hours. He is often late for work, for instance, when Jud, his stepbrother, steals his bicycle because Jud also is late for […]
Dennis Grunes 