cinema

Michael Caine and working-class stories in British cinema

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In the 1950s, the emergence of ‘angry young men’ writers and kitchen sink dramas like ‘Look Back in Anger’, led to an increase in working-class representation.

By Aimee Ferrier

For many years, the lives of working-class British people were invisible on screen. Not only that, but actors from working-class backgrounds were hard to come by, thus meaning that a large chunk of Britain’s screen icons were privately educated or well-connected figures. This imbalance within the industry prevented authentic stories from being told, silencing the voices and experiences of a massive group of the British population.

Posh actors dominated the screens with their received pronunciation accents that asserted them as well-educated figures. “The working-class person always had to have an accent before, was often a joker, and peripheral,” actor Rita Tushingham told The Independent. Indeed, there were hardly any working-class protagonists or stories about the plight of poverty, unemployment, governmental disillusionment, or abortion.

Then, in the 1950s, the ‘angry young men’ movement emerged within the world of literature, theatre, and film, changing everything. Post-war, a new generation of young people were feeling dismayed by the widespread levels of unemployment and dead-end jobs that forced people to work to the bone for little money. Many people were unable to afford nice places to live, and countless individuals were suffering from PTSD, grief, and a sense of malaise.

People’s childhood towns and cities were now destroyed by bombs, leaving what was once a community in ruins, and this physical representation of destruction and emptiness mirrored the emotions many were feeling at the time. This disillusionment came to a boiling point in the mid-1950s as people struggled to move forward and prosper in a country still ravished by the effects of war and economic disparity.

However, with John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, a voice finally cut through. Michael Caine once discussed the play with The Guardian, explaining: “When it changed, it was all down to the writers. They started writing for working-class people and it made all the difference. Playwrights like Noël Coward, someone I later knew very well, wrote middle-class parts for the stage. If you had a cockney accent you were going to play the butler. But John Osborne wrote Look Back in Anger in 1956, and that, I believe, was the first major piece of theatre that had a working-class hero.”

Things were beginning to change, with the stories of working-class people making more of a dent in popular culture than ever before. Other writers that were dubbed part of the ‘angry young men’ movement (although most hated this term) included Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, and John Braine, whose stories really changed the game in regards to the representation of normal British people and their struggles.

At the same time, the Free Cinema documentary movement helped to pave the way for depictions of British working-class issues on screen. These filmmakers—including Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, and Karel Reisz—used a cinema vérité style to cheaply chronicle elements of working-class life to great success.

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Hopes For Paradise: Terence Davies and The Long Day Closes

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By Rich Woodall | First Published May 22, 2022

Years ago, my Dad was trying to explain to me how it felt to see Lawrence of Arabia in the cinema back in the 1960s. Remembering those vast horizons, the steepled banks of sand and the sunrise turning the whole sky to rust he told me, “It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen.” What appeared on that screen was something completely out of scale with his own existence – not just a strange landscape, but an entirely alien perspective. Nobody anywhere had ever seen a desert the way David Lean and Freddie Young showed it to them in 1962, infinite in width and depth and yet also somehow captured within a screen on a wall in Hull, Wolverhampton or Liverpool.

This was the early days of the television boom. Most households had one, but it was two channels broadcast in bleary monochrome. The cinema was still where you went to get your images, a radical elsewhere that let you in on an experience utterly removed from the texture of your everyday life. Today, of course, the value of images has been subject to explosive hyperinflation. We all gorge on a constant stream of high-def footage. The cinema can still affect us with its scale and volume, but it takes effort to think of it as anything other than a jumbo-sized smartphone screen. When I think about my Dad’s experience of Lawrence of Arabia, I try to imagine living in a society where moving images were so scarce and precious. The only film I’ve ever seen that gives me a sense of what this might have felt like is Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes, which turns 30 this year.

Like Davies’ other early films, The Long Day Closes is a quasi-memoir inspired by the director’s growing up in 1950s Liverpool. The story revolves around Bud, a shy and fragile 12-year-old living on an urban terrace with his mother and three older siblings. This home is a space of tenderness and care, embedded in a close-knit community, although Bud is tortured by his inability to fully participate in the spiritual, romantic and social worlds that revolve around him. As Davies has said of himself, Bud is one of life’s spectators, a daydreamer and a voyeur.

No surprise, then, that Bud is most himself at the movies. In one especially lovely shot, the camera tracks along the front row of a cinema balcony, finally reaching Bud, leaning forward with his chin resting on his hands, a look of pure bliss on his face. But this isn’t so much a film about being at the pictures as wanting to be at the pictures. For most of the film, we follow Bud as he goes (reluctantly) to school and church or kicks around at home, and slowly we see how those couple of hours a week he spends at the cinema are rewiring his brain, reshaping his desires and altering the way he sees the world around him.

This is mostly expressed through exquisite shot composition and camerawork – hallmarks of Davies’ body of work. Sometimes we see through Bud’s eyes, and sometimes we watch him while he watches others, but again and again we’re with him as he stares out windows, through open doors and down empty hallways, searching for frames to organise his everyday experience the way he’s seen it on the screen. Early in the film, as he looks out of an upstairs window, Bud’s eye falls on a shirtless bricklayer, and he feels the first stirring of an urge he doesn’t yet have a name for. There’s something about the spatial logic of the shot that doesn’t quite add up. It feels like the brickie should be at ground level, but he’s filmed head on in the centre of the shot, as he’d appear if Bud were looking straight at him. It’s as if in his mind’s eye Bud is framing the man as he would if he were shooting a movie, transforming him momentarily into a matinee idol. Cinema gives Bud the language he needs to explore desires which every other sphere of his life forces him to repress.

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A poet of pain, ecstasy and epiphany, Terence Davies is a colossal loss to British cinema

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Thank goodness Davies experienced his late-career appreciation – he was a director of high seriousness and singularity and a man of vulnerability and true good humour

By Peter Bradshaw

Terence Davies was the great British movie artist of working class Catholic experience and gay identity, a passionate believer and practitioner of cinema. And was also a wonderfully stylish and self-assured presence in person, with a gorgeously resonant voice that might have belonged to a stage matinee idol.

I raised a glass of rose with a beaming Davies and Mark Cousins at the 2008 Cannes film festival after the triumphant premiere of Of Time and the City, Davies’s wonderful, personal docu-collage about his home city of Liverpool, a place he resurrected on screen with love and without cliche.

And from that moment, he had the satisfaction of knowing that the years of relative neglect that he had been suffering as a film-maker were over, and that he was a presence again in world cinema.

He was one of the great personal and autobiographical film-makers – with Of Time and the City, of course, but also his fervent evocation of childhood in The Long Day Closes (1992), his unflinchingly passionate and painful masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives (1983) and his early, mysterious trilogy Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983) – superb films which, in literary terms, might be compared with Beckett or BS Johnson.

The key word is transfiguration. For Davies, the act of memory and cinema transfigured the pain and shame of what he endured of abuse and bigotry in his own life. Without irony or affectation, he brought his early religious belief into parallel with these childhood experiences: these were his stations of the cross. Like Proust, he saw the awful link between art and pain as the agents of truth and the fixity of meaning.

His films – especially his earliest and most personal works – were not easy experiences, nor were they meant to be. His Distant Voices, Still Lives is unforgettable, perhaps because the adjectives in the title are so misleading. The voices are immediately present, the lives vividly in motion. The film’s austerity, beauty and artistry are a revelation. It is as gripping as any thriller and Davies finds a towering performance in the great actor Pete Postlethwaite as the terrifying dad who rules over his working class family with fear – but is secretly convulsed with fear himself and is capable of humour and gentleness. Davies’s attitude is complex, and in this film you can see another of his great themes: the urge to forgive and the terrible burden it places on you.

The Long Day Closes, from 1992, was another epiphanic study of childhood, a cine-poem of early experience and here Davies – like Fellini, Scorsese, Truffaut and Spielberg – evokes the moviegoing as a religious observance, but with pleasure where the shame and misery might otherwise go. His shot of sunlight drifting across a carpet is a thing of wonder: these are things that children look at and adults forget to see.

As the 90s wore on, Davies found it more difficult to get movies made, but his adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s The Neon Bible in 1995 transferred his distinctive worldview to an American setting.

So too did his superb treatment of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth in 2000, starring Gillian Anderson, a Wharton adaptation that easily stands comparison with Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence.

In his later career, Davies took on literary adaptations – conceding, perhaps, that these were more commercially acceptable and produced them at the highest pitch of intelligence and feeling. His version of Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea in 2011 was a very Daviesian account of loneliness and romantic love with Tom Hiddleston and Rachel Weisz; he brought the same intensity and severity to Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song in 2015. His last film, Benediction, was a fine study of the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, returning, to some degree, to his earlier themes of gay sexuality and the way secular passions are displaced into forms of worship.

He had lately been working on a tremendous sounding adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl – and we have to hope that this might yet be posthumously completed.

I should also record the rather extraordinary experience of recording an audio commentary with him and Matthew Guinness (son of Alec) of the Ealing movie Kind Hearts and Coronets. For him, communing with this classic was an almost ecstatic experience, a virtual seance of every creative contributor to the film, he seemed to know every line, every scene, every musical cue; his connoisseurship was compelling. He was a remarkable director.

Source: A poet of pain, ecstasy and epiphany, Terence Davies is a colossal loss to British cinema