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"Hope is the thing with feathers," so learns Oliver Twist in provincial South Yorkshire. The lad (David Bradley) is a "cheeky young 'un," his eyes narrow on a prematurely defeated visage, making deliveries around town before and after class. "I wouldn't be your teacher for all the coal in Barnsley," snarls his boss. (A rare spot of relaxation finds him reading the funnies on a grassy hill, in the distance industrial smokestacks ashen the sky.) Bro the brute (Freddie Fletcher), a whole school of tormentors and martinets, no future but toiling "down the pit." The sparrow takes a falcon, the kestrel in a nest off ancestral ruins points up the imagination of the downtrodden kid, and the poetry of the doggedly realist director. "Hawks can't be tamed. They're manned. It's wild and it's fierce and it's not bothered about anybody." Ken Loach's patient winnowing of How Green Was My Valley for the image of the rough-hewn nipper rapt alongside a majestic fowl, both "flying in a pocket of silence." Saturday night at the local dance hall, dates and quarrels and a bawdy song, a snapshot out of Forman or Olmi. (The prickly verisimilitude extends to the vernacular: "You chuck yer bloody money around like a Scotchman with no arms!") The hard-ass coach (Brian Glover) enters the football field to the fanfare of BBC's Sportsnight, the protagonist endures a cold morning as hapless goalie and then colder showers until acrobatic skills allow for a quick escape. (His subsequent coughing during the reading of Matthew 18:10 earns a caning from the headmaster.) Numb to an employment counselor but with a newfound passion before his peers, a boy's fragile hope finally dead in a garbage pail by the shed, "not worth stinkin' threepence." The proximity to Pialat's L'Enfance nue is specially salutary. Cinematography by Chris Menges. With Lynne Perrie, Colin Welland, Bob Bowes, Bernard Atha, Joey Kaye, Bill Dean, and Duggie Brown.
--- Fernando F. Croce |