Poor Cow (1967)

Come Decem­ber, it’s high­ly like­ly the broad­sheet arts pages will be dub­bing 2016 the year of Ken Loach, as Nuneaton’s favourite son has already net­ted a Palme d’Or for his lat­est fea­ture, I, Daniel Blake, and been the sub­ject of a career retro doc in cin­e­mas, named Ver­sus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach. The fun par­ty con­tin­ues with this restora­tion and re-release of his 1967 adap­ta­tion of Neil Dunn’s nov­el, ​‘Poor Cow’, con­cern­ing the tri­als, tricks and tribu­la­tions of a work­ing class moth­er attempt­ing to eke out a liv­ing in an unfor­giv­ing­ly bleak London.

Actor Car­ol White recalls a young Julie Christie as she plays the iron­i­cal­ly named Joy, left to fend for her­self and infant son, Jon­ny, when her wide­boy hub­by is sent down for a bun­gled heist. The film charts the many deci­sions she makes in search of some kind of small con­tent­ment in a world where all the chips seem to be stacked against her. Loach is extreme­ly mat­ter-of-fact in depict­ing the var­i­ous degra­da­tions she suf­fers, always empha­sis­ing the idea that she nev­er seems tru­ly upset or depressed by her sor­ry lot. The tragedy of the film is that Joy has nev­er tru­ly expe­ri­enced hap­pi­ness, so sti­fled mis­ery is her default set­ting. Her vic­to­ries in life are extreme­ly small ones.

This is inter­est­ing for Loach because it’s an exam­ple of a time before he became an explic­it­ly polit­i­cal film­mak­er. The film is a char­ac­ter study more than a nar­ra­tive dra­ma, and the details of Joy’s exis­tence become implic­it­ly rather than explic­it­ly polit­i­cal. Deep-set misog­y­ny which runs through all lev­els of soci­ety is one of the key themes, as Joy is used and abused by men of all stripes through­out the film. Poor Cow’s most grotesque sequence is a sweaty, back-room nudie shoot, made all the more depress­ing because Joy appears cheer­i­ly immune to the leery, greasy gents manip­u­lat­ing her and cack­ling from behind their cameras.

Where as Loach more recent­ly has become a direc­tor dri­ven entire­ly by nar­ra­tive econ­o­my and reel­ing a good, social­ly-rel­e­vant yarn, the strongest ele­ments here are those where the cam­era is allowed to drift off and soak up the details of a room. Every face that appears on screen tells a sto­ry. There’s an amaz­ing amount of colour in Poor Cow, and its pro­found­ly grim social-real­ist style caus­es the film to dou­ble as a melan­cholic doc­u­men­tary por­trait of the crag­gy-faced have-nots and doled-up strum­pets whose impos­si­ble dreams are paci­fied by booze, fags and egg sarnies.