Beginning with an eye-watering sequence depicting the birth of Carol White's baby boy. Thanks to director 'Kenneth' (as he was then billed) Loach's restless camerawork (punctuated by Godardian captions) the sixties here sways rather than swings in a film that manages to encompass nearly a century of British film history through the presence in the same picture of both Wally Patch and Malcolm MacDowall (not to mention future sitcom stars Kate Williams and Anna Karen); and it's apt that over thirty years later scenes from this of the young and saturnine Terence Stamp strumming his guitar were employed as flashbacks in 'The Limey' (1999).
Although it didn't seem like it at the time, we're now nearly twice as far from the sixties as the sixties were from the thirties. Life at the bottom of the heap remains as bleak in the twenty-first century as ever, and continues (doubtless to no one's regret more than Loach himself) to provide him with plenty of material. In his eighties he doesn't seem able to retire just yet.
Although it didn't seem like it at the time, we're now nearly twice as far from the sixties as the sixties were from the thirties. Life at the bottom of the heap remains as bleak in the twenty-first century as ever, and continues (doubtless to no one's regret more than Loach himself) to provide him with plenty of material. In his eighties he doesn't seem able to retire just yet.