Rent Kes (1969)

A British Masterpiece - Kes review by GI

Kes is a wonderful film adapted from a wonderful novel. It's a sad, heart warming and earnest story of a young boy, Billy, who lives on a Barnsley housing estate in the late 1960s. He has little future and no-one who actually cares either. His divorced mother shows no love and Billy has only his nasty, bullying brother as a role model. It's in his love of nature and the passion he finds in training a young kestrel that Billy has any hope of redemption. This is a sharp condemnation of British society and its education system based on harsh discipline and which ignores children like Billy. Anyone who was in school at this time will recognise the school scenes especially the comic yet tragic 'games' lesson with the fantastic Brian Glover as the PE Teacher who uses the lesson to live his own fantasy rather than give the children any sense of participation. The caning scene will also shock especially when you realise the actor playing the Headmaster was in fact an actual Headmaster! Indeed director Ken Loach used many non actors in the film giving it a realistic documentary-drama feel. Loach is famous for his socialist outlook but regardless of whether you agree with his politics he shines a very bright light on issues that cannot be ignored. The film touches on the mining community where the only hope for kids like Billy was a job in the coal mines. Billy rejects that future steadfastly throughout the film but the viewer is left with the knowledge that this is where he'll end up and of course in a few short years that industry will have died so watching the film today we know Billy has little to look forward to. This is a superb film and one everyone should make sure they see.

Key Loach. - Kes review by Steve

A boy and his pet film, with a difference. It is a critique of an education system which is complicit in the failure of the child; who will be just another kid sent down the mines. David Bradley plays a lonely, neglected working class kid from a Yorkshire mining town who finds self worth through his relationship with the wild kestrel he raises from a chick.

The teachers do not engage with him. His father has gone and his mother does not love him. But through the falcon he develops a capacity to understand, nurture, and be more fulfilled. This isn't like Disney, where the boy's dreams would come true. He is destroyed by others who are just as damaged as himself. He exists in a hierarchy of bullying.

At the apex is the disinterested headteacher who aimlessly hands out corporal punishment. Or more comically the resentful, intimidating games coach (Brian Glover) who act's like he's Bobby Charlton. Loach shoots this in a social realist style: the cast are amateurs; scenes are improvised in real locations; action is shown in long shots without montage.

This environment is absolutely real and Bradley is enduringly authentic. Sometimes momentum is lost while the director spells out what he presumes is unfamiliar to the audience. But Ken Loach's polemic, adapted from Barry Hines' classroom classic, connected with the British public more than any of his other films.