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Jul 18, 2011 Web Exclusive By Chris Tinkham

Ken Loach's 1970 film, Kes, about a lonely teenage boy named Billy Casper (David Bradley), who rears and trains a kestrel, is generally considered the second feature film from the esteemed British director. Indeed, Kes was Loach's second film to be distributed in theaters, following 1967's Poor Cow, but Loach had been working in television throughout the '60s and had been making (by today's standards) feature-length films for BBC1's The Wednesday Play. The intent of the anthology series was to air dramas that addressed Britain's social issues. Loach's 1966 film, Cathy Come Home, which chronicles a young mother's descent into homelessness, was a television event when it aired and still is regarded as one of the most important in British television history. The 77-minute film is included as a special feature with Criterion's Blu-ray/DVD release of Kes.

 

Being that Kes was Loach's first internationally recognized film (it was heralded at Cannes in 1970, screening out of competition) and is his first title for the Criterion Collection, Criterion has made this an essential introduction to Loach's work, renowned through the years for its concern and sympathy for working-class subjects. A 45-minute Kes making-of doc consists of exclusive recent interviews with Loach, Bradley, producer Tony Garnett, and cinematographer Chris Menges. In one section, Loach discusses how Kes was a reaction against 1960s British films and was inspired by the observational method of Czech titles such as Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde and Jirí Menzel's Closely Watched Trains. Ironically, British director Tony Richardson, who was at the forefront of '60s British filmmaking, was instrumental in helping Loach and Garnett to secure funding for Kes.

 

Set and shot in the Northern England mining town of Barnsley, Kes is based on the 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, written by Barry Hines. The title comes from a medieval epigram that pairs certain birds with people according to their social ranking, such as an eagle for an emperor, a gyrfalcon for a king, and a sparrowhawk for a priest. The lowest ranking is a kestrel for a knave. Hines, a teacher and Barnsley native who had experience in training kestrels, consulted with his students while writing the novel, to be sure the scenes portraying students and school life were accurate. Loach and Garnett took a similar approach in making Kes, casting mostly non-actors, including Bradley, and asking for their input.

 

Kes is a touching, sad and oftentimes funny film. Scrawny for 15 years old, Billy is bullied by his older brother and insistently berated by authority figures. He doesn't want to go on to work in a mine, but he's not engaged in school and has no alternative plan. After discovering a nest of baby kestrels, he steals a book on training falcons and patiently learns the skill. His time with the kestrel, his only friend, becomes his sanctuary. During class, when a teacher (Colin Welland) learns of Billy's skill from other students, he encourages Billy to lecture the class on how he trained the kestrel. Played disarmingly by Bradley, it's a heartwarming and enthralling highlight of the film.

 

In the making-of, Loach explains how working-class kids like Billy had potential and possible talents but were being shortchanged and disregarded by British society, a conflict he indicts as not only economic madness but humanly criminal. Kes had trouble finding theatrical distribution in England because of its subject matter and its characters' thick dialects. The filmmakers refused to have subtitles for cities in the South of England (although this release has that option and a postsync audio option). Kes found proponents at film festivals before playing to sold-out houses in limited release in Northern England. When it eventually debuted in London, it went on to play there for two years.

 

This Criterion release also includes a 50-minute profile of Loach for The Southbank Show. The piece coincided with his 1993 film Raining Stones, but preceded Ladybird, Ladybird (1994). Loach, on the heels of Hidden Agenda (1990) and Riff-Raff (1991), was experiencing a renaissance at the time, after enduring the '70s and '80s to less fanfare. In the '80s, he had made a series of documentaries for TV that didn't pass censors and never aired. One documentary, Which Side Are You On?, was commissioned by The Southbank Show but also was banned. It eventually aired, but not under the Southbank Show banner, and this is an intriguing topic of discussion during the profile. Both Kes and particularly Cathy Come Home are discussed at length, with observations from Stephen Frears and Alan Parker. In Kes, there's a classic sequence in which a buffoonish gym teacher (Brian Glover) leads the students in a disastrous soccer match, and Frears humorously compares Glover's grandiose introduction to that of Orson Welles in The Third Man.

 

Cathy Come Home should be viewed before the Southbank Show profile, as it contains spoilers. In the piece, Loach explains that he wanted his films for The Wednesday Play to be seen as almost a part of the news, to elicit the same kind of response, partly because the program aired after the news. Garnett, addressing Cathy Come Home's raw documentary style, recalls how he argued with the BBC that news and current affairs told lies in dealing with what they called fact, while he and Loach tried to tell the truth working in fiction. There's also an informative afterward by Graham Fuller with Cathy Come Home, where he discusses the historical context in which the film came to be. The film has a jump-cut, fast-forward narrative structure and an especially dynamic sound design that employs voice-over commentary from people of different classes and conflicting sympathies, which Fuller also addresses.

 

Kes was made for approximately 160,000 British pounds. Its naturalistic imagery still complements the story and setting aesthetically, but, from a technical standpoint, the images haven't held up as well as those from other films from the same period. The transfer here looks clean and free of debris, but there's occasional vignetting. It's the only noteworthy drawback on this bountiful release. (www.criterion.com/films/27560-kes)

Author rating: 8/10