15 DECEMBER 1967, Page 20

CINEMA

Up the creek

PENELOPE HOUSTON

Poor Cow (London Pavilion, 'X') Poor Cow makes a graceless and somehow patronising title for a graceless, somehow patronising film. Patronage, one imagines, is actually the last quality that Ken Loach and Nell Dunn would choose to have associated with their work. Nell Dunn wrote Up the Junc- tion for 'rv; Ken Loach directed it, as well as the celebrated Cathy Come Home. Their tele- vision reputation is for raw, South of the River realism, tape-recorder dialogue, the tele- virile urgencies of Battersea on sodden Satur- day nights. And on the big screen, as with some other television reputations, it begins to slide apart. Those lines of washing draped over back alleys are shot in Eastman Colour from fatally pretty angles, a cameraman's conceit of the slums. Snatches of overheard pub dialogue sound like the arduous reportage of old- fashioned Mass Observation surveys. Sooner or later, we know and they know, someone is going to tramp over a rubbish dump to the accompaniment of a snippet of straitened in- terior monologue. Repeatedly the film criss- crosses the line between facing up to its charac- ters and exploiting them for instant sociologi- cal mileage.

The film's particular poor cow is a little South Londoner named Joy (there's irony for you), who marries one bullying small-time crook, takes up with another (Terence Stamp), who's privately kinder but professionally tougher, and turns to shifty modelling and amateurish prostitution when both husband and lover are simultaneously incarcerated. Joy is the product of a mindless world; she's also indolent, acquisitive, shrewish and congenitally disloyal. At a slightly earlier stage in British movie realism, she would have been either the local bad girl or the heroine's confidante. Now she's promoted to heroine status, the film- makers seeming to feel that her unlovely qualities are somewhat redeemed by resilience and a simple, South London peasant devotion to her small boy. (Since, the child, for all its tender years, is played by two markedly dissirOir boys, this becomes complicated.) Joy is played by Carol White, an actress who looks like Julie Christie and sounds like Clap- ham Common. She's directed to play most scenes straightunmistakably an actress struggling valiantly to submerge herself in a part. Then tele-verite takes over, with dialogue that sounds patchily improvised or moments when Miss White (but we're now supposed to have forgotten that it's really Miss White and not South London Joy) seems to be making up semi-articulate answers to questions from an unseen interviewer. All one can say of this mish-mash of technique is that Jean-Lue Godard brings it off, and that others should get comprehensive insurance before embarking on it. Really to go into the question of why it doesn't work would take in complex distinc- tions between films and rv—having to do partly, I suspect, with the TV audience's bias towards factual trust and the film audience's bias towards fictional suspension of disbelief.

Ken Loach uses other devices: written chap- ter headings (The world was our oyster and we chose Ruislip'); short, dislocated, rhythm- breaking episodes; slabs of interior mono- logue. But for all these embellishments, and the dialogue's hard-working vulgarity, the general impression is that things haven't greatly changed—and, if anything, for the worse—since `realism' meant A Kind of Loving or A Taste of Honey. A giveaway is the seaside scene, long- standing favourite of British movie realists ever since Carol Reed made Bank Holiday. There is something about children on beaches and shots of, wanly defiant old women munching ice-cream cones that film-makers seem to cling to as contacts with a realer world.

In effect, if not in intention, this seaside look at sad, comic working-class England taking its pleasures grimly comes across as a view from the heights of privilege. Class and class-con- sciousness don't make things easy for film- makers; and it's no help when, as with Poor Cow, a film seems self-conscious as well as class-conscious. It's very aware of itself watch- ing its subject; and watching, one feels, with the eager, unquestioning show-me-the-worst eye of the TV sociologist on safari.