Recusant TV/ Film/ Theatre Reviews

Various authors

James Morrison

Selective Seventies

So there we have it: if Dominic Sandbrook’s latest attempt at lefty-baiting revisionism is to be believed, the Seventies was little more than a dry run for the 1980s. Far from being the decade that finally consigned consensus to history and, for a time at least, reawakened left-right ideological consciousness in the public at large – as many of us remember it – the 1970s were instead the birthplace of the rampant materialism, avarice and individualism that have largely typified Britain ever since. Such a shame 38-year-old Sandbrook wasn’t old enough to witness the period at first hand. Had he done so (with independent school-educated, Oxbridge-tinted blinkers removed) he might have seen something altogether different.

The (not-so) underlying thesis of Sandbrook’s eponymous BBC2 series about the era – and Seasons in the Sun, the piggybacking bestseller-by-numbers accompanying it – is that Seventies folk were Thatcherites before Thatcher. According to this reading, almost everyone – from campaigning gay rights activists and striking miners to swinging suburbanites – was on the take, and, importantly, no one gave two hoots about anyone else’s interests but their own. Such a shame his arguments don’t stack up. A central conceit of Sandbrook’s is to argue that, far from representing a last gasp of the tradition for collectivist forces to periodically rise up against insulated, out-of-touch governing classes, the strikers were (to a man, or woman) no more than exemplars of naked self-interest. Too bad he conveniently overlooks, among others, the building workers’ strike of 1972 – which saw Ted Heath’s Conservative government buffeted by a wave of secondary action by employees with nothing to gain personally from the builders’ satisfactory resolution of their dispute. In fact, so weary did the Tories become of the constant threat of sympathy strikes during this period that it was with ill-concealed relish that Margaret Thatcher’s maiden administration passed the Employment Act 1980 to restrict unions’ rights to call them – a full five years before the famous confrontation with her so-called ‘enemy within’ during the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike which led to her emboldened administration going still further.

More broadly, Sandbrook’s claim that Thatcher ‘inherited’, rather than moulded, the building-blocks of Thatcherism – an appetite for home ownership, spendthrift aspirationalism and right-wing economic models – is beyond disingenuous. To support his case, Sandbrook conjures up images of all the clichés associated with 1980s consumerism and applies them to the previous decade – according to him, the Seventies was awash with sharp-suited yuppies, wannabe property prospectors and credit-fuelled shopaholics. Yet in the mid-1970s home ownership had more or less stalled – with around half of all households in owner-occupation, in stark contrast to its exponential rise following the introduction of the Right to Buy scheme in 1981, which ultimately saw it peak at 70 per cent in 2003. Moreover, Sandbrook himself repeatedly acknowledges that by the middle of the decade Britain was in the economic doldrums – with family living standards squeezed, inflation in double digits, interest rates soaring and food and utility prices fast outstripping wages. While a short Barclaycard-waving bonanza did ensue during the ‘Barber Boom’ of 1972, in response to the radical tax-cutting agenda of Anthony Barber, a Tory Chancellor (sound familiar?) – when the bust came with a bang in 1974, so too did an abrupt end to Britain’s first (and, at the time, never-to-be-repeated) great experiment with mass consumerism.

It was the Thatcher government that was to ensure that attitudes and behaviours that might otherwise have been dismissed as out of character, even aberrant, became entrenched. True, by the time of the 1979 general election the Labour government had long since begun dancing (albeit reluctantly) to the Chicago School tune – striking a Faustian pact with the International Monetary Fund which saw it slash public spending in return for a £2.3 billion lifeline – but to pretend that Thatcher and her Shadow Ministers had had only a passing influence on the direction of political debate at national (or even global) level up to that point is to take deeply ahistorical liberties with the facts. Thatcher had been a leading light on the Conservative frontbenches since the early 1970s and leader of her party from shortly after its second, fateful, 1974 election defeat. Throughout the late 1970s – at least from the point of the 1976 IMF bailout onwards – it was the Tories, spearheaded by free market ideologues like Sir Keith Joseph, who increasingly sought to engineer both the political weather and the public mood. The neoliberal hegemony – one that has seen the utilitarian prospectus of the ‘market economy’ perverted into the amoral, devaluing ‘market society’ the philosopher Michael Sandel so eloquently deplores in his latest book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets – was engineered by Thatcher, Reagan, Friedman and their adherents. If Thatcher can be said to have ‘inherited’ a domestic political landscape (and country) of a particular hue in 1979, it was largely of her own making.

Leon Brown on

Spirit of ’45 (2013) UK, Ken Loach (89 minutes)

Tragical History Tour?

By Leon Brown

‘We got into bed at night with vermin. And then when we went to school in the morning we got hit by the teacher because we had dirty knees.’

Liverpudlian docker, Sam Watts’s reminiscences of a poverty-blighted childhood during the 1930s depression, overlaid with images of bed sheets crawling with lice, in Ken Loach’s Spirit of ’45, a feature-length documentary about the unfulfilled and betrayed promise of the 1945 postwar settlement, was for me the film’s pivotal moment. This was not just because I could literally observe the grimaces of the largely ageing and middle-class members of the audience surrounding me; even in the silvery half-light of a crowded weekday matinee. It was also because it provided the most powerful reminder of the rationale behind the establishment of the welfare state – now facing sustained assault by the most socially regressive and right-wing government since Stanley Baldwin’s National Government of the 1930s. It further underscored why it is imperative that everyone who believes in a civilised society, in which the poor are not demonised and pushed further into a life of squalor and misery, joins together in a new movement, on the left of British politics, to protect the welfare state.

This of course was the thematic thrust of the entire 89 minutes of Spirit of ‘45: a message conveyed simply and starkly in glorious monochrome (excepting the amusing clips of wannabe Jane Russells in Leicester Square on VE Day symbolising those heady initial days of post war euphoria and optimism). The film took the viewer from the slums inhabited by the urban working class in the1930s – who then comprised the majority of the UK population – to the vision of a ‘New Jerusalem’ and a country ‘fit for heroes’ symbolised by the Labour landslide of 1945 with its manifesto pledges of a National Health Service, wholesale nationalisation of the public utilities (water, electricity, gas and the railways) and public ownership of the coal industry.

It was heartening that Loach assembled an army of defenders of the post-1945 settlement which cut across the class divide: from doctors and economists to former dockers and coal miners. Even Tony Benn made an appearance. Yet it was noticeable and dispiriting that, like the audience around me, none of these defenders – excellent though their contributions were in the case of veteran doctors and doctors’ collectors – were below the age of 60. Indeed it is ironic that although the young are experiencing greater unemployment, debt and poor housing than any other age group they have more scepticism towards the welfare state than their parents and grandparents. Alarmingly, a recent poll by ComRes shows that the proportion of those aged 18-34 who believed over half of benefit claimants were ‘scroungers’ exceeded all other age groups by an eye-watering 10 percentage points.

Unquestionably the film’s vignettes of the privations of South Wales miners under the pre-war overlordship of ‘tyrant’ pit owners (the audience was reminded that they were blue-bloods and included the Bowes –Lyons : the Queen Mother’s birth family), were the most poignant moments. One miner recalled the death of his friend when the mine collapsed on him due to the pit owner’s refusal to invest in roof supports. Another recounted the story of a miner’s family being thrown out of their cottage, tied to the pit owner’s country estate, when their child was caught apple scrumping in the grounds.

It was reminiscences like these, by and about ordinary people, which brought the film to life and avoided it lapsing into clichéd history. Credit must also be given to Loach for his canonisation of Aneurin Bevan – a man whom most people, judging by my own experience of working in education and the health service, have never heard of implying a narrowness in the current history syllabus taught in British schools. Labour’s 1945 Secretary of State for Health, was a miner from the South Wales valleys and bona fide working class hero – unlike the vast majority of today’ s Labour Party the gentrification of which the film correctly pinpoints as one of the key reasons for the decline in working class mass political engagement. In many ways, along with Keir Hardie (the father of the Labour Party), Bevan is the unsullied hero not only of this film but also the entire British Labour Movement. His monument, of course, is the National Health Service, an institution now facing a mortal threat to its continued survival and whose foundation Bevan only ensured in 1948 by ‘stuffing the doctors mouths with silver’ after the British Medical Association voted against its formation.

Another qualified strength of the film was its realism about the ‘worm in the apple of 1945’ – the fact that the nationalised industries were not run at the local level by workers cooperatives, as the Left had hoped, but instead by state bureaucrats. This involved rehabilitating those familiar pantomime villains – the pre-war pit owners. However, the film missed a trick in fully explaining exactly why workers’ control would have been preferable to state control. Surely any management (even a management of workers) will inevitably put the interests of management first unless they have to stand for regular election and are answerable to their workforce.

This qualified strength was slightly undermined by a lack of clear explanation as to why the welfare state came into being. The welfare state was advocated by the Beveridge Report of 1943 and the Labour Party and then reluctantly accepted by the Conservatives (who retained the NHS and almost all the postwar nationalisations for three decades) not so much out of idealism but out of far-sighted political pragmatism: namely the fear that unless the living conditions of the working class were substantially improved there was a risk of social upheaval and even revolution in Britain on the 1917 Russian model.

Ironically, the principal criticism of the film by mainstream newspaper reviewers – that the narrative swerved abruptly from footage of the Festival of Britain in 1951 to those endlessly replayed, hiss-inducing images of Margaret Thatcher entering Downing Street in May 1979, disingenuously quoting St Francis of Assisi – with no reference to the intervening 28 years – was in some ways a strength. This is because it incorporated an effective semi split-screen analogue midway which allowed the viewer to compare the gains for working people in the immediate aftermath of 1945, covered by the film’s first half, with the slow and systematic erosion of the post war settlement in the form of privatisation (with catastrophic results in the case of transport and gas, water and electricity) during the 1980s and 1990s. There was also some coverage of the fragmentation of the NHS beginning with the contracting out of hospital cleaning in 1983 and continuing with the internal market and PFI of the New Labour years and now the threatened total breakup of the entire NHS with the Coalition’s Health and Social Care Bill – much of which comes into effect in April 2013.

However, what this ‘split screen’ approach lacked was a complete lack of analysis as to why Mrs Thatcher came to power and why her ideology stayed in office long after she left Number 10, was then adopted by her New Labour successors and still remains the failed blueprint for governing Britain and much of the world. This is integral to building an understanding of why it has proven near impossible for the British Left to defeat the forces Thatcherism unleashed, namely: greed, rampant selfishness, callousness, cultural philistinism, inter- class hatred and xenophobia, even had the Labour Party, after 1983, made a concerted effort to do so. There was not the slightest exploration of Thatcherism’s enduring popular appeal to around half the electorate – including many New Labour and Liberal Democrat voters: the aspirational working and middle classes – who instinctively supported and were duped by Thatcherism’s gospel of patriotism, aspiration, low taxes, home ownership, contempt for welfare recipients and simplistic ‘private is good’ vs ‘public is bad’ dogma. This appeal was largely choreographed by the tabloid press which gave Thatcher’s government almost unlimited patronage due to her smashing of the print unions and relaxation of newspaper ownership laws which allowed the likes of Rupert Murdoch to effectively buy the political system on the basis presumably of ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’. Equally significant was Thatcher’s calamitous early 1980s monetarist experiment which led to a final showdown with British industry – actually in decline since the late 19^th century and something not mentioned by the film. The early 1980s recession, caused by strict control of the money supply, was wholly orchestrated to break the unions, in particular the National Union of Mineworkers during the Miners Strike by causing mass unemployment and inflating the power of the City of London to a level where it could bring the British and world economy to its knees in 2008. Thatcher changed the world – largely for the ill – simply because the British people of 1979 had ceased to be the same people they were in 1945. By 1979 there were several million more middle class people than in 1945 and their numbers were to swell further due to increased access to easy credit and cheap mortgages fuelled by relentless Tory and Labour deregulation of the banks between 1979 and 2007. The reason Thatcher was able to completely smash the post-war social democratic consensus – which had spanned traditional party allegiances – was because the British people, by and large, became aspirational suburbanites: disgusted with the trade unions after the 1978-1979 Winter of Discontent, falling living standards, high taxation and engulfed by a despair engendered by oil shock inflation, unemployment and the national humiliation of the IMF bailout of the British economy 1976. It was little wonder therefore that Thatcherism’s sham optimism exploited this mood of hopelessness – symbolised for many by the excesses of the trade unions in the 1970s – and was subsequently allowed to invade every area of British life. Undeniably, Thatcherism’s real agenda was not to improve the lives of ordinary people (wages have remained stagnant for the middle classes and have fallen year-on-year for the poorest since the mid-seventies) but rather ‘to bring about a fundamental and shift in the balance of power and wealth (in favour of rich people and their families)’ to grotesquely parody a key sentence in the Labour Programme 1973. This, and the creation of a massive underclass (the dreaded and demonised so-called ‘chavs’), who are now scapegoated and exploited at will by comedy shows like Little Britain and the benefits system, permitted by the early 1980s shake -out of British industry, is Thatcherism’s most decisive achievement although it also represents its most abject failure and total moral bankruptcy.

Although one does not expect or even desire a Ken Loach film to be ideologically even-handed little mention is given of the failure of the British Left since 1945 to defend and consolidate the post war settlement and mould it around a changing world as the social democrats in Scandinavia, Germany and France did with much success: using a mixed economy which involved sustained investment in industry, financial services and a strong welfare state to promote economic growth and steadily close the gap between rich and poor. Instead the film suggests, only partially correctly, that the government ‘failed to invest in industry’ (in comparison to our continental neighbours research and development in the UK was admittedly less) but does not acknowledge that the oil shock and hyperinflation of the mid-seventies wiped out the effectiveness of any government investment no matter how massive : a loop of unprofitability intensified by restrictive management structures, militant unions, overmanning and most crucially globalisation as exemplified by the fiasco of nationalised automobile companies such as British Leyland and Meriden which opened the door to Thatcher to deliver the coup de grace to British industry in 1980-82.

All in all, though, the film’s humane and impassioned plea for a return to the spirit of national optimism and solidarity of 1945, in order to erase growing inequality and hand power back to ordinary people, is heartening and welcome. This is despite an occasionally sketchy reading of history coupled with a lack of realism about the true situation facing this country and continent: a landscape of possibly permanent government and private debt and retrenchment, Victorian levels of inequality and an entrenched plutocratic oligarchy – who will resist all political efforts (even if the will existed) to curb their profits and power. They are now arguably stronger than at any time since the Edwardian era. The mood of the British people in 2013, brainwashed by the media and anaesthetised by consumerism and sport, sadly does not remotely resemble the mood of the British people in 1945 although social conditions are indeed hurtling back to where they were in the 1930s. The film tacitly recognises this suggesting that ‘the idea of socialism’ in Britain ‘is very weak’ ‘whereas capitalism…’ despite its clear and abundant failures ‘…is still strong.’ Unfortunately, it took such consciousness about the failings of capitalism, on a massive scale, intensified by a depression and world war and assisted by massive injections of American aid into Europe and Britain, to change the system last time around. It is difficult to identify the factors which could trigger change this time around barring revolution, war or massive public engagement in political action – any of which may eventually occur if the living standards of the middle classes continue to decline indefinitely; not an impossibility. As for UK Uncut and Occupy while they are welcome movements they currently only number their supporters in the tens of thousands whereas hundreds of thousands if not millions are needed. However, in the UK’s current socio-economic climate where ingrained media-conditioned political apathy, conservatism and class division are reflected by astonishing levels of tabloid-misinformed hostility towards welfare claimants and widespread veneration of the class system (exemplified by last year’s Jubilee and the popularity of witless soap-operas like Downton Abbey), it is difficult to envisage how the welfare state and the NHS can be saved let alone strengthened. Equally it is not easy to see how British industry can be resurrected when China and India can endlessly produce consumer goods far more cheaply with scant regard for the wages or living conditions of its workers. It is Spirit of ‘45’s complete overlooking of the fact that socialism, if it is to revive and prosper as a political force, has to do so on an international scale, rather than in just one country, which is thus possibly its most serious flaw.

Review: Gethsemane by David Hare, directed by Howard Davies

From time to time during the two-and-a-half hours of David Hare’s latest dissection of the corpse of New Labour, his scalpel almost draws flesh blood.

The play’s biblical title – an allusion to the garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem in which Jesus fleetingly contemplated ducking out of martyring himself for the sake of humanity – might have worked well a decade ago, when it was only just dawning on Blair’s apologists on the Left that his modest 1997 election pledges really were as revolutionary as things were going to get. If this tin-pot messiah ever had harboured a genuine desire for social justice – somewhere in the depths of the mindset that had first induced him to join the Labour Party – he had long since sacrificed it on the altar of political cowardice and opportunism in his own private Gethsemane moment.

Today, nearly 13 unlucky years after Blair’s first landslide, Hare’s laboured metaphor for the choice between doing the right thing and taking the easy way out seems old-hat, and ever so slightly naïve. Leaving aside the fact that the notion of Labour ‘selling out’ is now so widely recognised (even among its political opponents) as to almost qualify as historical record, much of the play’s dialogue suggests Hare still clings to the outmoded idea that Blair’s soulless parade of managerial ministers believed in something in the first place.

As with several of Hare’s previous plays, Gethsemane opens with a short monologue from the character who is to become its narrator – in this case, an idealistic schoolteacher, who turns out to be unequivocally its most virtuous protagonist. After her enigmatic introduction (which hints at more sinister undercurrents than are ever subsequently explored), we are quickly plunged into familiar territory. The first scene proper opens with a sweaty-palmed suit awaiting his audience with an initially unspecified host. Is he an aspiring special advisor or private secretary about to be grilled by an interview panel, or to be ushered into his first meeting with the prime minister? No, in a promisingly naff twist, he is sprung on by corpulent, pony-tailed pop impresario Otton Fallon – a ‘new-moneyed, up-by-his-bootstraps grotesque played with relish by Stanley Townsend. The former (husband, as it transpires, of the aforementioned teacher) has been headhunted to join Fallon’s consultancy, a firm whose business model appears to be predicated on nothing more substantial than road-testing new canapés at Labour corporate fund-raisers. So far, so Derek Draper.

Elsewhere, careerist Home Secretary Meredith Guest (Tamsin Greig) is busy blasting her sullen teenage daughter over her cannabis habit. From here we are taken on a frequently cartoonish and occasionally soapy series of backstairs encounters in the corridors of power, the highlight of which is an amusing but rather laboured (pardon the pun) row between Guest and the PM in his Downing Street gym-cum-playroom (replete with drum-kit and dumbbells).

Gethsemane has its moments. Admittedly, there is something unnervingly prescient about the inclusion of a (female) Home Secretary struggling to contain a potentially explosive family scandal – albeit not, on this occasion, her husband’s predilection for porn. But beyond this, what does the play have to say that hasn’t already been said (not least by Hare himself) so many times before?

In fact, the whole play has a simplistic heavy-handedness about it that would be more in the work of a playwright infinitely less experienced than Hare, whose earlier works (The Absence of War in particular) were masterpieces of nuanced characterisation. It’s not enough for Guest to be a bland career politician – she has to be a closet idealist who is suffering an (ultimately under-explored) crisis of conscience. If only this were true of our real-life political masters. Surely if we’ve learnt one thing about the ‘Blair generation’ over the past decade or so it’s how very few of them appear to have ever harboured anything approaching socialist ideals. For the most part, the story of the Blair years isn’t one of idealism corrupted: it’s of ideology-free zones swaying unsteadily from one empty, focus group-led initiative to another.

Then there’s the fact that said minister’s errant daughter attends a fee-paying school. This is far too unsubtle: as Hare well knows, even the most ardent Blairite ministers have balked at hypocrisy as brazen as this. It was enough to briefly set the backbenches alight when it emerged, shortly after his election to the Labour leadership, that the great man himself had a son at grant-maintained school (ditto current deputy leader Harriet Harman, who even sent one of hers to a grammar). By plastering on the ‘state versus private’ anti-privilege message in such bold primary colours, Hare ducks making the point about Labour’s more insidious betrayals: its U-turn over allowing comprehensives to opt out of local authority control, and the willingness of supposedly left-wing ministers to publicly condemn academic selection while privately sending their own precious offspring to selective schools.

In terms of timing, Gethsemane ultimately falls between two stools. Ten years ago, when people were only just beginning to see through the emperor’s new clothes, it might have packed a punch. Sometime in the future, when Gordon Brown has also long gone, elements of it may seem fresh again. With a bit of revision, it may even have something lasting to say about this peculiarly cosmetic political age. For now, like New Labour itself, it just seems stale.

Film Review:

Peterloo (2018)

By Leon Brown

The Peterloo Massacre of 16 August 1819 is not one of the most recognisable dates in British history. It has never taken its place alongside 14th October 1066 (Battle of Hastings); 30th January 1649 (Execution of Charles 1st); October 21st 1805 (Battle of Trafalgar) and September 3rd 1939 (outbreak of the Second World War) as dates which previous generations of schoolchildren were forced to learn by rote.

Nonetheless the massacre – which occurred when the yeomanry scythed into an unarmed pro-democracy rally at St Peters Field, Manchester; four years after the Battle of Waterloo (hence the ingenious moniker) – was an event marked by popular outrage and the shedding of as much ink as blood. This was most eloquently exemplified by Percy Bysshe-Shelley’s coruscating poem, The Masque of Anarchy (1819).

The tremors from ‘Peterloo’ are felt to this day. Without it there would have been no Tolpuddle Martyrs or TUC, no Chartists, no Great Reform Acts. There would have been no Independent Labour Party in 1900, no old age pensions in Lloyd George’s 1909 ‘People’s Budget,’ no Welfare State in 1945, no NHS in 1948. And there would emphatically have been no Mrs Pankhurst and the Suffragettes, no votes for women and no universal adult suffrage. Peterloo was the Big Bang of British democracy which we can all thank (or curse – if you are one of the millions of our fellow countrymen and women who are clearly now of an authoritarian disposition) for our present-day freedoms.

Arguably Peterloo has acquired an even greater historical resonance in the wake of the financial crash of 2008 and the grinding austerity subsequently imposed on the country which represents the greatest transfer of wealth from poor to the rich in British history. This possibly explains why the event remains obscure. Was it that – quite simply – the powers that be hushed up Peterloo in the fear that it might trigger an even bloodier fight for self-determination as had occurred in France and the 13 American colonies only three or four decades earlier? Mike Leigh’s magisterial Peterloo (2018) does not waste the opportunity of redressing this imbalance with a gusto which at times verges on the splenetic.

The film begins on the battlefield of Waterloo where we witness a soldier, Joseph, (David Moorst) suffering what psychiatrists would now diagnose as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with the somatic symptoms of involuntary twitching, head jerking, visual disturbance and hypersensitivity to noise all too sadly apparent.

Scroll forward four years and we enter Joseph’s post-war world: a narrow, mean dawn-of-industrial Manchester delineated by cramped, rat-infested, lice-ridden, back-to back redbrick proto-Coronation Street terraces. In one of these his family of six live presided over with a tender toughness by Nellie (Maxine Peake) – his hard-working, cynical yet idealistic mother who when putting her children to bed wonders what life will be like for her daughter in 1900 when she is 87.

Against this gritty backdrop is the gathering momentum of committees – meeting in public houses and coffee shops; founded to agitate against post-war austerity and for the right to vote. These scenes have been criticised as overlong and tediously polemical but in many ways they give the film a passionate intensity and narrative thrust it might otherwise lack. Meanwhile, in London, Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth – played with spidery cantankerousness by Karl Anderson and his network of spies – watch the baccillus of revolution creep across the nation with alarm. They fear the Manchester rally will be the precursor to Britain’s own Bastille or Boston Tea Party.

Throughout, Leigh depicts the democratic pioneers and pamphleteers either as fundamentally decent, naïve provincials or would-be English Jacobins: hell- bent on giving the Establishment the kicking it deserves. The latter is best exemplified by the rousing, ominous formations of youthful militia who rabble-rouse and drill practice on Saddleworth moor in defiance of their older, more sagacious leaders. The scene in which they are spied on by the diabolically corvine Chief Constable Nadin (Victor Maguire), sent out by the factory owners of Manchester to round up the most militant young mavericks, provides an initially deceptive bucolic juxtaposition to the urban grime, over the hill, several miles away. However, this is soon replaced by undiluted terror when Nadin brutally deals with John Baggueley (Nico Mirallegro) – the hottest of the young hotheads.

By and large, however, Leigh imbues these parochial radicals with the light Dickensian charm which characterises many of his films. This, of course, is seen as Leigh’s fatal flaw: his ‘patronising’ attitude towards the working class; something Ken Loach is never accused of.

Leigh’s tendency towards caricature is most apparent in the character of the passionate, bumbling and very Lancastrian, Samuel Bamford (Neil Bell), who invites nationally famous radical and orator Henry Hunt – a vainglorious, foppish Wiltshire landowner – played by Rory Kinnear – to speak at the rally. Bamford’s initial idolisation of Hunt soon turns to an exaggeratedly cordial contempt when he recognises that Hunt appears to be less interested in making common cause with his northern comrades than in hijacking the rally to burnish his reputation. The scenes in which he arrives in Manchester and is spirited away to a safe house where he hides for several days, demanding a ‘light repast’ on arrival before issuing demands for the conduct of the march while sitting for a portrait, are delightfully comic. One wonders here whether Leigh is satirising certain young contemporary British ‘radicals’ who must remain nameless.

The rally, of course, is the centrepiece of the entire movie and Leigh sucks the viewer straight into the vortex. Firstly, we are swept along on the naïve bore of optimism and civic pride with which the families march towards Peter’s field, their banners unfurled. On the field itself; meanwhile, Manchester’s mercantile class, in their doublets and stockings, fulminate in outrage at the temerity of their minions downing tools over their glasses of port and shanks of roast beef while the marchers share out desultory loaves of bread.

Of course, we know what is coming but when it arrives it is no less shocking for its bludgeoning brutality: the charging horses, the sabre slashes, the falling bodies, the screams, the terror without end. Here Leigh is every bit the equal of David Lean in his depiction of the 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre in Doctor Zhivago (1965) or Richard Attenborough in his depiction of the 1913 Amritsar Massacre in Gandhi (1982).

As in those films there is no silver lining to the crushing of dissent. Instead the viewer is treated to a blackly comic scene which is the cinematic equivalent of James Gillray’s famous satirical cartoon of the Prince Regent, A Voluptuary Under The Horrors of Digestion (1792). Here the bloated Prince (Tim McInnerney in a grotesque parody of his Percy role in Blackadder), drunkenly demands an update on the massacre from his insipid Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool (Robert Wilfort), while being fed candied fruit by Lady Conyngham (Marion Bailey).

For the reformers and the families of the slaughtered innocents this is total defeat. For Nellie it is a terrible personal tragedy. In the final scene she buries Joseph cut down by his own fellow soldiers and countrymen a feat those of Napoleon’s army, a foreign enemy foreign power, never achieved on the battlefield of Waterloo.

Peterloo is a qualified triumph. The only criticisms which can be levelled at it are that at two-and-a-half hours it is possibly overlong and that the characters lack nuance and depth – most notably those of the Establishment all of whom are presented as villains; to the very last man. Another criticism is that it lacks truly memorable dialogue. Otherwise it is further proof that Mike Leigh – along with Ken Loach – is Britain’s pre-eminent film director. The fact it has received only lukewarm reviews suggests that although – as in 1819 – we live in an era marked by a growing recognition of proliferating social injustice there is still some way to go before the British public ‘rise like lions after slumber, in an unvanquishable number!’ It is this which is perhaps the central hidden message in this badly-needed call-to-arms epic.

Prakash Kona

Re-viewing Luis Bunuel’s “Land without Bread” (1933)

“Land without Bread” is a fascinating documentary from the younger Bunuel, an extraordinary attempt to portray the sufferings of peasants of Las Hurdes in Spain, very intensely done although without the controlled irony of his later work.

To admirers of Bunuel’s work, the documentary gives an insight into some of the techniques he is fond of applying as a filmmaker. On the emotional side you see a Bunuel who can be deeply persuasive and compelling in a way forcing his audience to think along with the narrator. This is unlike the later Bunuel who leaves the audience to draw their own conclusions and is more realistic in his insight that the poor are people before they’re poor and that poverty is a social condition thereby implying that the poor are as much capable of the excesses of the bourgeoisie as anyone else. This we see for example in the movie Viridiana where the holier-than-thou protagonist ends up almost getting raped by one of the beggars she picks from the street in order to change their lives.

If Dali accused Bunuel of being a “communist” and “atheist” this documentary lends credence to the accusation. There is a sense of commitment to the subject more than the art form. The commitment takes the form of urgency and perspective and the audience is spared of the detachment you would expect from a documentary filmmaker. Bunuel makes demands on his viewers. However, if you remember that this documentary was released in 1933, these are the pre-war generation viewers and fascism is on the rise, the sidelining of artistic demands to political ones becomes kind of obvious. Much later Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) attempts to do something similar in placing political commitment above formalistic ones in his relentless attack on the Nazis and in making a Jew the hero of his film.

The stark realism of the documentary shows in a couple of scenes with animals. A donkey that is eaten away by bees and a goat that falls down the mountain. Apparently Bunuel slaughtered both the animals to give a dimension to his perspective something that would not be very amusing to a more modern audience oriented towards animal rights.

You cannot deny that the human suffering of the village is real. You can see the poverty that made fascism possible in Spain. It almost seemed like this was a European colony in Asia or Africa. Such was the poverty of its inhabitants. It’s a poverty that makes artists, poets, saints, revolutionaries and fascists a reality in the same breath. The scene of the little girl lying on the street and “whose gums and throat are inflamed” and that is dead two days later was a particularly poignant one. Says the narrator at one point: “The realism of a painting by Zurbaran or Ribera is nothing compared to reality itself,” thereby acknowledging his limits as an artist in the face of the grim reality faced by the poor and downtrodden. Interestingly, the narrator highlights one segment of reality over that of another. The poverty and pain is emphasized and not the ability of the poor to survive at all costs in this pitiless environment.

My favorite line in the movie is when one of the miserably poor school kids writes on the board a maxim in the book which says: “Respect other people’s property!” Somewhere the narrator subtly echoes what Proudhon says that “property is theft.” In respecting “property” as a social and moral value the poor become complicit in their own oppression. You would expect such poverty to destroy the inner character of the people. But, it does not. “Despite the misery in which the Hurdanos live their moral and religious sense is the same as anywhere else in the world.” Ideology in the form of religion and morality works at a certain level to keep them subjugated forever.

The conclusion of the film makes the argument all the more evident without mincing words:

“The misery shown in this film is not without remedy. Elsewhere in Spain, hill people, peasants and workers have achieved better conditions through mutual self-help. They have made demands of the authorities for a better life….will give impetus to the coming elections and lead to a Popular Front government. The military rebellion backed by Hitler and Mussolini seeks to bring back the privileges of the rich. But the workers and peasants of Spain will defeat Franco and his cronies. With the help of anti-fascists from all over the world civil war will give way to peace, work and happiness. And the miserable homes you saw in this film will disappear for ever.”

If that did not happen and in fact the poet Lorca was murdered in 1936, the same year that Franco assumed power and was the head of Spain until 1975 the year of his death – that does not take away the historical value of the documentary itself. It’s the attempt of a great artist to divorce reality from aesthetics and in the process create an alternate aesthetic. It’s an idealist at work here with the tools of realism. It’s an artist who is responding to the needs of his generation while at the same