Overlooked Classics: Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home (1966)

***Carol White would have turned seventy years old today.  Here is a repost detailing one of her greatest      films in honor of the day.**                        Moving, meaningful, insightful, and downright life altering, Ken Loach’s extraordinary 1966 British teleplay Cathy Come Home is one of the most essential works of the sixties and its current unavailability is frustrating to say the least.

Starring an absolutely devastating Carol White, Cathy Come Home is a socially outraged production that takes a searing look at Britain’s homeless and housing problems of the mid sixties. The fact that many of the themes and issues it looks at are still relevant in not just Britain but all over the world make it as necessary in 2008 as it was in 1966.
Cathy Come Home started out as a play written by Jeremy Sandford, a well to do Londoner who had moved to the struggling Battersea district in the late fifties with his wife (Up The Junction author Nell Dunn) to research the living conditions of the lower and working classes. Cathy Come Home is not an exploitative piece at all though, and Sandford should be applauded for creating one of the most sympathetic and honest portrayals ever written about several of the key social problems that have plagued modern urban society since the Industrial Revolution.
The BBC expressed interest fairly quickly in Sandford’s heartbreaking story of a young married couple and their children who lose everything after the husband loses his job. Sanford's work needed just the right treatment though, and 29 year old television director Ken Loach was called in to handle what was destined to be the intense and delicate directorial duties.
Loach had been working in British television since the early sixties and was a year away from his extraordinary big screen debut (1967’s Poor Cow) when Cathy Come Home made its shattering debut on British television. Loach’s work on Cathy Come Home would set in motion one of the most consistently brilliant careers in all of modern cinema, and his trademark character studies filmed in a documentary style can all be traced back to his work on this 75 minute teleplay.
Sometimes called the 'British Bardot', 25 year old Carol White was already an established star in Britain when Cathy Come Home premiered in 1966. Long undervalued as an actress, White gives a historic tour-de-force performance as the teleplay’s doomed title character. Loach recalls on the DVD’s terrific and informative audio commentary that White threw herself into the role with a wild abandon and that the part took its toll on her personally throughout the three week shoot. The brilliant White would work again with Loach on the unforgettable Poor Cow (co-starring with Terence Stamp) and she would continue to prove herself as one of Britain’s great actors throughout the late sixties and early seventies. She would tragically pass away in the early nineties, and she has still yet to receive her due as a great actress and major figure in film history.
Character actor Ray Brooks had already worked with Loach in the series Z Cars and he turns in a solid and knowing performance as Cathy’s out of work husband Reg. The rest of the cast is filled out with some familiar British character actors and many first timers cast because Loach knew that some unfamiliar faces would give the film the kind of authentic look he was hoping to capture.
One of the most striking things about Cathy Come Home is the way Loach manages to combine an obvious narrative with such a seemingly free form documentary style. Other lesser filmmakers could spend years and millions of dollars and not match the intimate details Loach achieves here with a small television budget in just three weeks. The film, shot on location in 16mm, is an absolute visual wonder to behold. Filled with many sometimes unforgiving close-ups of his cast and shot starkly in black and white, Cathy Come Home manages that rare feat of not feeling like a film about real life but instead seems to somehow actually capture it.
Expertly mixing Stanford’s dialogue with improvisation, Cathy Come Home is a bravely grueling experience that manages to expose the fatal flaws seemingly inherent in the Social Systems it is exploring. Loach points out in the commentary that it was important for him to communicate to the audience that Cathy is a victim here, and the frustrating obstacles that continue to come her way are the system’s fault. The film presents a catastrophic snowball effect that takes everything away from the young title character from her family to her humanity, and one would have to be pretty heartless to not feel for her during her plight at the hands of a bureaucracy unable and unwilling to care for those in need.
While it’s often remembered for those mesmerizing close ups of a damaged and destroyed Carol White, Loach’s film (like Charles Burnett’s later 1977 production Killer of Sheep) manages to capture bits of daily life that just aren’t often seen in cinema. From families putting out their wash on lines connecting their run down tenement homes, to the fury of an elderly man being forced from his nearly unlivable shack, to children playing in an eerie graveyard like car dump, Cathy Come Home is one of the most penetrating looks at the fragility of the lower and working classes ever captured on film.
Cathy Come Home stunned the 12 million plus viewers who tuned in on the night of November 16’th 1966 to watch it. Outraged letters from viewers who had never seen the plight of the poor expressed so strongly or eloquently on film began to pour into the offices of both the BBC and British politicians, and by December the charity organization Shelter was started in order to combat Britain’s growing homeless problem. Outside of being one of the most shocking masterpieces of the cycle of films known as The British Kitchen Sink Dramas, Cathy Come Home is one of the rare films in history that directly caused social change.
Cathy Come Home was named the second greatest British Television program in history in a 2000 BFI poll. It came out on DVD on a British Region 2 disc in 2003 but I have been told it has now slipped out of print. It has never to my knowledge been available in the United States. The film's current unavailability is a real tragedy considering that many of the problems facing Cathy in the film are a reality for a countless number of people all over the world. Speaking to the BBC during an interview on the film, Ken Loach said, "We were saying ‘this happens and it shouldn’t’.” It continues to happen and it still shouldn't. Cathy Come Home is a major masterpiece and one of the most heroic pieces of cinema I have ever seen.

-Jeremy Richey, originally written in 2008-

My Fantasy Criterion Collection: Volume 6

Fantasy Criterion Collection Volume 6: Ken Loach's Poor Cow



Ideal Specs for a Two-Disc Set

Transfer Supervised By Ken Loach
Audio Commentary with Ken Loach and Terence Stamp
Battersea Bardot: Vintage Featurette on Carol White
Remembering Carol: Friends and Peers Remember Carol White
Throw It In As Well: A Look at the British 'Kitchen Sink' Dramas of the Sixties
The Limey Connection: A Conversation With Steven Soderbergh on The Limey
Scoring Poor Cow: A Conversation with and Performance by Donovan
Photo Gallery
Bonus Book: The Original Nell Dunn Novel

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting

I have been preparing to do a long piece on the late Carol White and lately I have been trying to see as many films of hers as I can. Last night I finally got to see Mark Robson's follow up to VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1967), the very strange and heavily flawed DADDY'S GONE A-HUNTING from 1969.
Carol, looking quite stunning here, stars as Cathy Palmer, a young woman from London who has recently moved to San Francisco to pursue an art career. She immediately meets and becomes involved with a strange young man named Kenneth, played with by a miscast Scott Hylands. Kenneth comes across as an immediate oddball and one wonders why Cathy would be at all drawn to this irritating and obviously unstable man.
Cathy becomes pregnant right around the time she realizes that Kenneth is totally hopeless and has an illegal abortion. She soon meets the aspiring politician Jack Byrnes, played by the always great Paul Burke, and attempts to start a new life. This is harder than she thinks as Kenneth, obsessed by the idea that she killed his baby, begins stalking her.

DADDY'S GONE A-HUNTING has a very effective first hour which is helped immensely by the creepy San Francisco location shooting, a remarkable John Williams score and Robson's stylish direction. Carol White is extremely good in the first hour of the film as well and she portrays Cathy's confusion and fear remarkably well. Hylands Kenneth though is a weak link all the way through. Hyland isn't creepy enough to be truly frightening and more than anything else he is just remarkably annoying.
The film really loses its footing in the last 45 minutes when Robson throws anything resembling logic right out the window. The screenplay, credited amazingly enough to Larry Cohen and Lorenzo Semple Jr., is filled with so many lapses and holes that finally the whole thing feels like an exercise in stupidity. The police in this are particularly dense and I found myself literally talking to the screen in the last half hour in a futile attempt to force the characters to do the most obvious and simple acts.
Major problems with the second half aside, DADDY'S GONE A-HUNTING is still effective enough in the first hour to give a slight recommendation to. Robson routinely makes ill judged choices but his films are always interesting to watch. The cinematography and color photography by Ernest Laszlo is very striking all the way through and like I said previously, this early score by John Williams is really fine. The theme song, sung by Lyn Roman with lyrics by Dory Previn, is extremely effective and works very well for the film.
This is an extremely off-kilter and odd film. At one point a strange reference is made to Ken Loach's remarkable CATHY COME HOME (1966) that had starred Carol White and there is also an uncomfortable feeling that the film is some sort of weird pro-life manifesto, even though the abortion is only really handled as a plot device.
One wonders if the screenplay by the usually reliable Cohen and Semple was messed with somewhere along the way. Semple Jr. had just penned the amazing PRETTY POISON (1968) and was getting ready to embark on a decade filled with always interesting work ranging from THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974) to KING KONG (1976).
Cohen, of course, was just a few years away from his amazing work in the Seventies and Eighties which would find him writing and directing some of the best exploitation films ever.
Mark Robson would pass away less than a decade after DADDY'S GONE A-HUNTING and it is one of his last notable films with only four flawed features following it. The lovely, talented and finally tragic Carol White, just in her late twenties in 1969, was getting ready to fight some major personal demons and would manage to make less than a dozen more films before passing away of liver disease just after her fiftieth birthday in 1991.
DADDY'S GONE A-HUNTING is currently out of print and is pretty hard to find, as our most of Carol White's films. It is a troubling and flawed film but one worth at least giving a look to. It is never less than interesting and one of the last films we have that features the talented Carol White still at the peak of her powers.

My tribute to the late Carol White will be appearing soon.