Of the three great British working-class films of the early 1960s (the others being SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING and A TASTE OF HONEY) this is perhaps the least celebrated: less exuberant than Karel Reisz’s adaptation of Alan Sillitoe’s Nottingham-set novel and not as overtly poignant as Tony Richardson’s take on Shelagh Delaney’s play, filmed in and around Salford.
All three stories deal with the consequences of unintended pregnancy, yet while Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) treats it as another example of ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down’ – literally – and Delaney’s Jo (Rita Tushingham) resolves to go it alone, Stan Barstow’s hero Vic Brown (Alan Bates) does what he thinks is the decent thing and marries Ingrid Rothwell (June Ritchie), plunging himself into a domestic nightmare, personified by Ingrid’s mother (Thora Hird at her most purse-lipped and poisonous).
Vic has been in two minds about his relationship with Ingrid from the outset – she’s a secretary adjacent to the drawing office where he works alongside a bunch of leering wolf-whistlers, deploring their behaviour while carrying a much-thumbed magazine of nude pictures inside his jacket. And as he confides to one of his mates once sex has taken place on a Sunday afternoon in Mrs Rothwell’s absence: ‘Sometimes I really fancy her, the next night I can hardly stand the sight of her’. A bleak registry office scene and a miscarriage later, Vic’s dilemma is starker than ever as a future in the Rothwells’ semi – game shows on the 12-inch telly every night – stretches before him.
A KIND OF LOVING transcends cliché by finding the truth in its Lancashire locations…
Well over fifty years since the film’s release, the pregnancy plot has become a symbol of trapped Northernness, happily parodied by Victoria Wood among others, but A KIND OF LOVING transcends cliché by finding the truth in its Lancashire locations, everywhere from steep hills of terraced housing to the more upmarket ‘Windermere Crescent’ and the novelty of Vic’s newly-married sister’s flat, decorated in a riot of 1960s bad taste. Ordinary life both working and social – in factory office and canteen, the cinemas and dance-halls, shopping arcades and allotments – is realistically detailed: John Schlesinger had made the short documentary TERMINUS for British Transport Films a year earlier, and that day in the life of Waterloo Station showed the same feeling for common humanity.
And this warmth, in contrast to Vic’s ambivalent and often chilly angst, is helped immeasurably by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s screenplay, every conversation on a bus or at work given depth however throwaway, every overheard line characterful (including the wincingly spot-on Pathe news commentary in the cinema: ‘It’s taken a traditional pub game to cement real international friendship’). Which makes Mrs Rothwell’s unvarnished ‘You filthy pig’ tirade after Vic vomits over the back of her sofa all the more vicious. Not that Vic is above his own snarling rejoinders, and the film’s last line (‘We’re married, aren’t we?’) suggests anything but a happy ending as the couple take a stroll overlooking their dirty town.
Always adept with actors, Schlesinger elicits strong performances from his three principals; equally memorable are the smaller parts and it’s no surprise that the likes of James Bolam, Jack Smethurst, Bryan Mosley, Helen Fraser and Leonard Rossiter among others went on to smaller-screen fame, the latter pair appearing to great effect in BILLY LIAR, Schlesinger’s next, developed from Keith Waterhouse’s novel and play.
The cinematographer on both films was Denys Coop, and the restoration of A KIND OF LOVING – from the very first scene where scruffy kids rush across a derelict wasteland to a chiming ice-cream van – brings out via the brilliance of his camerawork the sad magnificence, so much of its time, of a doomed industrial landscape.
Studiocanal and Emfoundation are pleased to announce the release of a new restoration of A KIND OF LOVING on DVD, for the first time on Blu-ray, and EST.
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