Poor Cow
Poor Cow
1967
Directed by Ken Loach
Produced by Joseph Janni
Screenplay by Nell Dunn and Ken Loach
Based on the novel, Poor Cow, by Nell Dunn
Photography by Brian Probya
Music by Donovan
The 60s films revisited series continues… .
CAST
Carol White – Joy
Terence Stamp – Dave
John Bindon – Tom
Queenie Watts – Aunt Emm
Kate Williams – Beryl
This was Ken Loach’s first feature film. He had established his reputation on TV from Z Cars on (we have the BFI Ken Loach Collection) leading to Up The Junction (1965) and culminating in 1966 with Cathy Come Home, still a searing indictment of social care for the vulnerable in the 1960s. My viewing companion, Karen, says it was one of her most powerful screen experiences of the 60s, and made her terrified of having children (Cathy’s child is taken away by Social Services). It was one of BBC’s Wednesday Play series. In a 2000 Radio Times poll it was voted “best single television drama ever made.” It starred Carol White as Cathy. We rewatched it a couple of years ago. It has not diminished.
Poor Cow by Nell Dunn was published the same year as the film, and Nell Dunn was the author of Up The Junction too.
An unusual aspect of the film is the selection of Intertitles breaking up the scenes.
Ken Loach made his name for realism, and for the technique of using improvisation in scenes. As we settled to watch Poor Cow, made soon after Cathy Come Home, but in colour, and still with Carol White as the lead and focus of the entire film, Karen warned me, ‘In my memory it’s nowhere near as good as Cathy Come Home.’
Terence Stamp has spoken of the improvisation in Poor Cow:
Ken Loach had met Carol White during Cathy Come Home and he was inspired, in part by her, to write Poor Cow. But he really didn’t write it; we didn’t really have a script. That was one of the things that was interesting about it. It was just wholly improvised. He had the idea, he had the overall trajectory in his mind, but we didn’t have a script. And, consequently, it had to be Take One because each of us had cameras on us. So before a take, he’d say something to Carol, and then he would say something to me, and we only discovered once the camera was rolling that he’d given us completely different directions. That’s why he needed two cameras, because he needed the confusion and the spontaneity. That predated The Limey, which was another film that I made that was only first takes.
Terence Stamp, AV Club online, 2013
An example is where Joy throws stew over Dave (Terence Stamp). Terence Stamp was not told it was going to happen. He is interviewed for the DVD extras:
It’s not really working with a script. Just before ACTION, he would whisper something to me, then whisper something to Carol, and so it was all just between ACTION and CUT. It was the first time I’d ever done 100% spontaneous.
Terence Stamp
Loach points out that TV directors were used to working fast with a small team, whereas feature film had different traditions.
There’s a problem with improvisation on film. Mostly, you work with the actors long before a camera gets there. Mike Leigh is the ultimate directorial exponent. The actors improvise and invent the back story for their characters and it’s done in a rehearsal room well away from cameras and lights. Loach’s method was total spontaneity on the day. Try improvising with thirty people standing around waiting and watching you, let alone doing it first take. All our ELT videos had to be tightly scripted because they had specific language points, but I fondly remember Jim Sweeney and Cathryn Harrison in one. It was at Glastonbury Tor, and they were an argumentative couple trying to interest a bored teenager in the Tor. They stayed in character all day between takes and the back story they developed had me in tears of laughter. But it was between takes with a small crew. Stamp and White had to improvise in a feature film setting (with the high cost of film stock) and get it right first time.
While it was a major critical AND financial success in 1967, they didn’t always manage, for me.
I’ve started running subtitles on some of these 60s films, so as to highlight and remember dialogue. The dialogue in Poor Cow is sometimes apt, but also often veering to forced. Terence Stamp might be a genuine Cockney (Queenie Watts certainly was) and Carol White says her parents were Cockneys, and she was brought up in Hammersmith (a long way from Bow Bells, then) but because they’re trying to improvise a lot of it comes across as Cor, Luv a duck! Mockney. It sometimes sounds fake yet all the cast are authentic Londoners. Their accents shouldn’t sound fake or forced, but they can come across that way. I admit that it might simply be that the Cockney of fifty years ago sounds overdone to modern ears.
Interviewed at the time, Carol White said of the improvisation:
It’s terribly natural, very easy for me to do.
Carol White
Carol White may have inspired Nell Dunn to write it. Terence Stamp was effusive in his praise:
I just assumed she was a natural. I assumed she hadn’t come up through the theatre, or been to drama school like the rest of us, but she was really “present.” Her sense of presence was equal to the greats … as present as anyone I’ve worked with before or since.
Terence Stamp, DVD extras
Lobby Card: John Binden as Tom, Carol White as Joy
John Binden was interesting casting, recruited by Ken Loach as a villain with a “penchant for domestic violence.” It was Binden’s first film and he was the “real thing.” He appeared in Performance, one of this series of 60s retrospective reviews. According to IMDB:
John Bindon was well-known in the 1960s and 1970s as an actor who specialised in playing violent thugs. Off-screen, he was notorious for his violent temper and his habit of provoking fights in pubs for no other reason than to prove what a “hard man” he was. He was a gangster who was an associate of the Krays and the Richardsons. He ran a protection racket and worked as a drug dealer in the West London district of Fulham. He was also a friend of Princess Margaret whom he met on the Caribbean island of Mustique. Following the death of a fellow gangster, Johnny Darke, in November 1978 at a club in Fulham, he was charged with murder. He was acquitted of all charges at the Old Bailey but his notoriety put an end to his acting career and he drifted into obscurity.
Internet Movie Data Base
1967?
The film is strangely out of time. It was filmed in 1967 (Ken Loach complains it took twice as long as it should have) and hit British screens in December 1967. For most of us, it was an early 1968 movie. I saw it in Hull, so it would have been early in 1968. But to me it appears to be 1964 or 1965.
So, it’s 1967 set in the criminal underclass of London … people jump to say Cockney / East End, but Nell Dunn actually set her stories ‘South of the river’ (as in the 1960s taxi driver’s, ‘No, guv’nor. I’m not going south of the river at this time of night.’) in Battersea and Clapham. The soundtrack is credited as by Donovan, but then they use curated material like The Crying Game by Dave Berry (1964), Not Fade Away by The Rolling Stones (1964), Funny How Love Can Be By The Ivy League (1965), Daydream by the Lovin’ Spoonful (1966), and Let’s Go To San Francisco by The Flowerpot Men (1967). At one point Tom hopes that Joy won’t do up the flat with “psychedelic curtains” but it’s a world away from psychedelia or Swinging London. It really feels and looks two or three years earlier. Carol White in her 1966 interview says it’s set among ‘the lower class’ but these are not ‘working class’ but rather ‘thieving class.’ Let’s say ‘underclass.’ London always had that divide between “Up West” versus the East End and South of The River (which by 2020 has almost disappeared). Joy and her friend Beryl gaze at two 60s women dressed like “dolly birds” and comment ruefully how young they look (they would be the same age) … they’re from a different world.
Story
It’s all centred on Carol White’s character, Joy. She leaves home and marries Tom (John Bindon), and they have a child, Jonny. Tom’s a bit of a bastard, and abusive. He’s caught in a major robbery and sent to prison. We are in no doubt that Joy knows all about it and enjoys a share out of the proceeds.
She moves in with Aunt Emm (Queenie Watts) who is an ageing prostitute, or in Cockney slang “a brass”. (see below) Joy takes up with Dave (Terence Stamp) who is equally criminal, but a much nicer guy, taking her and Jonny out to the country to go camping (the sheep terrify her), and to the beach. It suffers somewhat from Terence Stamp’s innate lack of sexual charisma, as demonstrated in his improvised line in bed with Carol (from memory):
DAVE: If you don’t make a move, we’ll be here all day.
On the beach at Bognor
The trouble is, Dave gets convicted for a robbery in which an elderly woman is blinded, and gets locked up for twelve years.
Terence Stamp as Dave
Joy moves back in with Aunt Emm, and takes a job as a barmaid. She decides to wait for Dave, and divorce Tom. In a section shamefully reminiscent of the Confessions of a (Window Cleaner etc) light-porn film series, she cheerfully invites the baker in for a quickie in exchange for a couple of buns … the old milkman / plumber myth beloved of seaside postcards, where randy housewives await the call of any tradesman for a bit on the side.
Joy models in provocative poses for a photographer’s club (where some don’t have films in their cameras). She is highly promiscuous, much to the chagrin of Dave on prison visits, who has heard rumours.
Joy visits Dave in prison
She starts divorce proceedings (a good comedy scene with the lawyer) and cheerfully admits that she likes men “giving her a couple of quid” (though with the baker a couple of buns did the trick). She considers turning professional as ‘a brass’ but lacks the focus / business acumen (!).
Tom gets out of prison, and she goes back to him (he appears to have a bit of cash). He still slaps her around. She comes home to find Tom watching TV and Jonny is missing. She searches frantically and finds him beyond the bonfires on a demolition site. She’s stuck with Tom, dreaming of Dave. She realizes that all that matters to her is Jonny.
Looking for Jonny
A contemporary review found it patronising, which is exactly the word that occurred to both of us re-watching it.
Use of children
It starts with a real newborn baby. We were both unhappy with the use of small children in violent and unpleasant scenes. It probably represents poverty accurately (the effort of boil-washing terry nappies which we see Joy doing), but Jonny wanders around a lot naked from the waist down.
Boiling nappies on the stove. Carol White as Joy.
In 2020, the director would find his home raided and his laptop being confiscated by the police, to say the least. In 21st century terms, those scenes should definitely be cut. I don’t imagine for a minute there was any ill intent at the time, but times have changed. Jimmy Savile, Cyril Smith et al have changed our perception. But whenever, it WAS exploitative to film a toddler like this. The child cannot consent to be filmed and it is recorded on screen forever.
Poverty or culture?
We are in no doubt that Cathy Comes Home is driven by poverty. I don’t think Loach succeeds in the same way with Poor Cow. The crooks seems to make a fair bit of money, and the pub regulars don’t look skint. It’s more a poverty of culture than money, a poverty of aspiration, resulting from a poverty of education. The choild (three kids play Jonny at different ages) has no books, no toys. A poignant moment is seeing his delight at having a bucket and spade on the beach.
Words … Brass
Beryl and Joy … “If I turned professional, I’d lose the pleasure of it.”
See Joy’s quote. She decides not to become a brass. Opinions differ on the word. Some say it’s short for brass flute. Shakespeare calls the character who has to dress as a woman in A Midsummer Night’s Dream “Flute” so it goes back a long way. Others brass nail (rhyming slang, ‘tail.’) or just brass for arse. I had heard it was brass nail (rhyming slang for the much older word, ‘stale’, a word used by Shakespeare, who also operated “South of the River.”!)
Soundtrack
Poor Cow: B-side of Jennifer Juniper, 1968
Donovan doesn’t do as much as he’s credited for. Most of the fragments are written by John Shakespeare, with either Ken Lewis or Geoff Stephens. Geoff Stephens wrote The Crying Game (which is probably why it was used). John Shakespeare and Ken Lewis also wrote Let’s Go To San Francisco by The Flowerpot Men, a studio creation, actually by Carter-Lewis aka The Ivy League (they also use an Ivy League song).
Donovan’s contribution was Be Not Too Hard (lyric by Christopher Logue). Poor Love and Colours. They don’t use Donovan’s hit version but instead use Terence Stamp singing it. Poor love, retitled Poor Cow was released as the B-side of Jennifer Juniper. It had been written originally when Donovan thought he might do a Lord of The Rings soundtrack. Donovan wanted to release a Poor Cow soundtrack, but it never happened. In 1967 record labels jealously guarded their material, and it was a major task to release a curated soundtrack. However, Joan Baez recorded Be Not Too Hard.
Just reading an interview last month, it’s a shame about Donovan who still boasts of teaching guitar licks to John Lennon and melodies to George Harrison. But then this is the guy who sat down to play Bob Dylan his “composition “Tangerine Eyes” without realizing it was Mr Tambourine Man’s melody with new words.
DVD & Blu Ray, current version:
CRITICS
The dismal life of a young London mother who lives in squalor with her criminal husband. Television-style fictional documentary determined to rub one’s nose in the mire. Innovative, and occasionally striking but not very likeable.
Helliwell’s Film Guide
Poor Cow from 1967 – his debut film, in fact – now looks more than ever like his key early masterpiece. It has an extraordinary freshness and openness, and an effortless scene-by-scene swing in the story that hardly seems like a story at all. To see it rereleased on the cinema screen after 50 years is a vividly detailed time-capsule experience. Its artistry is only augmented by its archival interest, and it was all I could do not to stand up and try to walk forward into the screen, like Alice through a kind of looking glass, and enter a London not so very different from Dickens’s – especially the staggering tenement scenes – or even Henry Fielding’s. Every shot shows how Loach and his cinematographer Bryan Probyn had an extraordinary eye for ambient period detail.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 2016
THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …
A Taste of Honey (1961)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Performance (1970)
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