Glances at Undervalued Classics: Cathy Come Home (1966)

Moving, meaningful, insightful, and downright life altering, Ken Loach’s extraordinary 1966 British teleplay Cathy Come Home is one of the most essential works of the sixties, and its current unavailability is frustrating to say the least.

Starring an absolutely devastating Carol White, Cathy Come Home is a socially outraged production that takes a searing look at Britain’s housing problems in the mid sixties. The fact that many of the issues, concerning both poor living conditions and homelessness, it looks at are still relevant all over the world make it as necessary in 2009 as it was in 1966.

Cathy Come Home started out as a play written by Jeremy Sandford, a well to do Londoner who had moved to the struggling Battersea district in the late fifties with his wife (Up The Junction author Nell Dunn) to research the living conditions of the lower and working classes. Cathy Come Home is not an exploitative piece at all though, and Sandford should be applauded for creating one of the most sympathetic and honest portrayals ever written about several of the key social problems that have plagued modern urban society since the Industrial Revolution.

The BBC expressed interest fairly quickly in Sandford’s heartbreaking story of a young married couple and their children who lose everything after the husband loses his job. Sanford’s work needed just the right treatment though, and 29-year-old television director Ken Loach was called in to handle what was destined to be the intense and delicate directorial duties.

Loach had been working in British television since the early sixties and was a year away from his extraordinary big screen debut (1967’s Poor Cow) when Cathy Come Home made its shattering debut on British television. Loach’s work on Cathy Come Home would set in motion one of the most consistently brilliant careers in all of modern cinema, and his trademark character studies filmed in a documentary style can all be traced back to this 75 minute teleplay.

Sometimes called the ‘British Bardot’, 25-year-old Carol White was already an established star in Britain when Cathy Come Home premiered in 1966. Long undervalued as an actress, White gives a historic tour-de-force performance as the teleplay’s doomed title character. Loach recalls on the DVD’s terrific and informative audio commentary that White threw herself into the role with a wild abandon, and that the part took its toll on her personally throughout the three week shoot. The brilliant White would work again with Loach on the unforgettable Poor Cow (co-starring with Terence Stamp) and she would continue to prove herself as one of Britain’s great actors throughout the late sixties and early seventies. She would tragically pass away in the early nineties, and she has still yet to receive her due as a great actress and major figure in film history.

Character actor Ray Brooks had already worked with Loach in the series Z Cars and he turns in a solid and knowing performance as Cathy’s out of work husband Reg. The rest of the cast is filled out with some familiar British character actors and many first timers, cast because Loach knew that some unfamiliar faces would give the film the kind of authentic look he was hoping to capture.

One of the most striking things about Cathy Come Home is the way Loach manages to combine an obvious narrative with such a seemingly free form documentary style. Other lesser filmmakers could spend years and millions of dollars and not match the intimate details Loach achieves here with a small television budget in just three weeks. The film, shot on location in 16mm, is an absolute visual wonder to behold. Filled with many sometimes-unforgiving close-ups of his cast and shot starkly in black and white, Cathy Come Home manages that rare feat of not feeling like a film about real life but instead seems to somehow actually capture it.

Expertly mixing Stanford’s dialogue with improvisation, Cathy Come Home is a bravely grueling experience that manages to expose the fatal flaws seemingly inherent in the Social Systems it is exploring. Loach points out in the commentary that it was important for him to communicate to the audience that Cathy is a victim here, and the frustrating obstacles that continue to come her way are the system’s fault. The film presents a catastrophic snowball effect that takes everything away from the young title character from her family to her humanity, and one would have to be pretty heartless to not feel for her during her plight at the hands of a bureaucracy unable and unwilling to care for those in need.

While it’s often remembered for those mesmerizing close ups of a damaged and destroyed Carol White, Loach’s film (like Charles Burnett’s later 1977 production Killer of Sheep) manages to capture bits of daily life that just aren’t often seen in cinema. From families putting out their wash on lines connecting their run down tenement homes, to the fury of an elderly man being forced from his nearly unlivable shack, to children playing in an eerie graveyard like car dump, Cathy Come Home is one of the most penetrating looks at the fragility of the lower and working classes ever captured on film.

Cathy Come Home stunned the 12 million plus viewers who tuned in on the night of November 16’th 1966 to watch it. Outraged letters from viewers who had never seen the plight of the poor expressed so strongly or eloquently on film began to pour into the offices of both the BBC and British politicians, and by December the charity organization Shelter was started in order to combat Britain’s growing homeless problem. Outside of being one of the most shocking masterpieces of the cycle of films known as The British Kitchen Sink Dramas, Cathy Come Home is one of the rare films in history that directly caused social change.

Cathy Come Home was named the second greatest British Television program in history in a 2000 BFI poll. It came out on DVD on a British Region 2 disc in 2003 but it has now slipped out of print. It has never to my knowledge been available in the United States. The film’s current unavailability is a real tragedy considering that many of the problems facing Cathy in the film are a reality for a countless number of people all over the world. Speaking to the BBC during an interview on the film, Ken Loach said, “We were saying ‘this happens and it shouldn’t’.” It continues to happen and it still shouldn’t. Cathy Come Home is a major masterpiece and one of the most heroic pieces of cinema ever shot.

Jeremy Richey has an English Degree and another in History from WKU. He has a lifelong interest in film and music and writes daily on his favorites at mooninthegutter.blogspot.com He also has a side project dedicated to the neglected career of Nastassja Kinski at nostalgiakinky.blogspot.com Visit him at www.myspace.com/jeremy_richey