A KIND OF LOVING (74)

Directed by: John Schlesinger (1962)

Starring: Alan Bates, June Ritchie, Thora Hird

The Pitch: A young draughtsman in the North of England gets a girl pregnant and reluctantly agrees to marry her.

Theo Sez: Seen on a video double-bill with its contemporary A TASTE OF HONEY (rated 65), which is better known but nowhere near as honest or valuable. Unlike that film (and Schlesinger's own BILLY LIAR) this isn't about a misfit, nor is the hero really an "angry young man" : what it recalls isn't so much the bolshie, up-the-workers tone - or the Nouvelle Vague borrowings - of kitchen-sink cinema as the more understated, sympathetic observation of neo-realism and its various offshoots (like Olmi's IL POSTO, made a year before this). Its sharp, unfussy way with detail - trying to smell your own breath before a big date, that kind of thing - makes even the rather picaresque first half a pleasure ; when it ups the ante halfway through, trapping its protagonist in an unhappy marriage, you wonder if it has the clarity of vision (not to mention the guts) to do the situation justice, but the result is among the screen's finest depictions of a relationship under terminal strain - the mother-in-law (the root of all evil, inevitably) not tyrannical as such but rigid and unfriendly, the wife siding with her mother, our hero increasingly frustrated and unreasonable (bravely, it's made clear that he's almost as much to blame). The ending is inconclusive - the couple deciding, rather half-heartedly, to give it a second chance - which is pretty much what you'd expect. It's not a film of big statements, or even big ideas (nowadays it would almost certainly be made-for-TV). It's a wry little testament of what it meant to be young and trapped in that place and at that time ; and, as such, you've got to respect it.