Forty-five years after its original transmission as part of The Wednesday Play series, and coinciding with the BFI’s month-long celebration of the work of Ken Loach, the BBC have re-released one of the venerable director’s most feted early works on DVD.
Despite the gaping social and economic chasms between 1966 and today, the problems faced by Reg and Cathy Ward as their lives spiral through homelessness and despair are more relevant than ever in the modern age.
‘The great majority of the homeless families we deal with are decent citizens,’ one of the many faceless narrators states at one point, ‘and all they want is a home of their own.’ This is Cathy (Carol White) and Reg (Ray Brooks) in a nutshell. They start the film young and happy, their world full of promise and pity. They fall in love, get engaged, married and pregnant, and move into their own house. Life seems momentarily blissful – but it is already teetering on the edge of collapse.
Reg has an accident at work, goes on the sick and loses his job, forcing them down a progressively steeper descent into destitution. They move from their home to a council house, but a lack of money sees them evicted. To avoid their creditors, they move to a caravan with gypsies, but they’re forced out when the camp is firebombed.
With no money and nowhere to go, they move to temporary sheltered accommodation where Reg isn’t welcome. Eventually, they drift apart and Cathy’s children are taken into care. ‘We’re not interested in you now,’ the man from the social services tells her, ‘it’s the kids we’re worried about now.’
Loach’s economical storytelling – we see Cathy’s engagement, marriage and pregnancy, Reg’s accident and subsequent loss of work and the birth of their first baby all within the opening fifteen minutes – and the close-up, handheld camerawork of cinematographer Tony Imi give Cathy Come Home both its famous, documentary-style realism and a swiftness of pace that makes the young couple’s plunge into poverty even starker and more unsettling.
Cathy starts as carefree, immaculately-coiffured and well-dressed, but with each setback her hair loses its lustre, her clothes become more bedraggled and the happy gleam in her eyes has become a haunted, thousand-yard-stare gawk of wounded misery. It’s a superb performance from Carol White, made even more moving by the desperate way her character tries to maintain an optimistic outlook until the true horror of her family’s circumstances is too dreadful to ignore.
If Cathy Come Home was remade today, the protagonists’ litany of troubles would almost certainly include drug abuse and crime, followed either by a grisly, violent conclusion or a redemptive, artificially ‘happy’ ending. However, the hopelessly resigned sight of Cathy sat on a railway platform, unloved and alone, with no money and nowhere to go, is an image that lingers long in the memory without any sensationalistic trappings and remains as affecting today as it did forty five years ago.
As another of the anonymous voiceovers points out, ‘Homelessness was regarded as a passing, post-war phase, but now the problem appears to be with us for the foreseeable future.’ It was and it is; take away the period trimmings and the film could be a tale of contemporary Britain.
When Cathy cries, ‘You don’t care! You only pretend to care!’ it’s as uncomfortable for viewers in 2011 as it was for those watching its original transmission – a fact of which Ken Loach can be justifiably proud and the successive governments of this country should be profoundly ashamed.
Released on DVD on Monday 5th September 2011 by 2Entertain.