Poor Cow

Dir: Ken Loach

1967

****

After working with director Ken Loach in adapting her novel of short stories ‘Up the Junction’ in 1965, author Nell Dunn worked again with Loach in adapting her collection of interviews called ‘Talking to Women’ a few years later. The collection of interviews were collected together to form a fictional character called Joy in Dunn’s first novel Poor Cow. It was Ken Loach's first feature film, after a series of successful TV productions – Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home being the most famous. It wasn’t the sort of story you’d expect from someone in Dunn’s position being the daughter of Sir Philip Dunn and the maternal granddaughter of the 5th Earl of Rosslyn – the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. She was born in London and educated at a convent, which she left at the age of 14. Nell's father didn't believe that his daughters needed any qualifications, and as a result Nell has never passed an exam in her life. She only learnt to read at nine years old and "whenever my father saw my appalling spelling, he would laugh. But it wasn't an unkind laugh. In his laugh there was the message, 'You are a completely original person, and everything you do has your own mark on it.' He wanted us all to be unique," she says. She came from an upper-class background, a million miles away from the lives she would write about but in 1959 Dunn moved to Battersea and made friends there and worked, for a time, in a sweet factory. This world inspired much of what Dunn would later write and Ken Loach was the only director working at the time who could have adapted her work so authentically. The story is about 18-year-old Joy (played by Carol White). She begins her catalogue of bad choices by running away from home with Tom (John Bindon). They marry and have a son, Johnny. When Tom, a thief who mentally and physically abuses Joy, is jailed for four years after attempting a big robbery, she is left on her own with their son. After briefly sharing a room with her Aunt Emm (Queenie Watts), an aging prostitute, she moves in with Dave (Terence Stamp), one of Tom's former associates. Dave is tender and understanding in his treatment of Johnny and Joy, but the idyll is punctured when Dave gets 12 years for robbery. Intending to be faithful, Joy writes to him constantly, moves back with Aunt Emm, and initiates divorce proceedings against Tom. She takes a job as a barmaid, starts modelling for a seedy photographers' club and drifts into promiscuity. But when Tom is released, Joy agrees to go back to him for Johnny’s sake. One evening, after Tom has beaten her up, she runs out of their flat and returns to discover that Johnny is missing. After a frantic search, she finds him playing on a demolition site. Realising how much Johnny means to her, she accepts the need of compromise and stays with Tom, but she continues to dream of a distant future with Dave. Joy’s life and experiences are a collection of real life stories Dunn collected during her time working in Battersea and talking with the women in and around the sweet factory in which she worked. The actors themselves also gave the film the authenticity the story needed. Terence Stamp once commented that Ken Loach was inspired after meeting Carol White during Cathy Come Home. The story was by Dunn but Loach guided the film the way he believed it should be told. There wasn’t much of a script with Loach choosing instead to let the actors improvise. He would typically only use one take for each scene, telling each actor separately what he wanted them to do, which was usually the opposite to what he’d tell the other actor in the same scene. Having two cameras running at the same time was also key, somewhat confusing the actors but keeping them alert and adding an important level of spontaneity. Carol White was a troubled soul who also came from working-class roots. She was a hard working actor but many failed relationships (with actors such as  Richard Burton, Frank Sinatra, Oliver Reed and Paul Burke) which hindered her career. She got into drugs and became an alcoholic, dying young. Her poor choices are eerily similar to that of Joy’s. John Bindon, who played her husband Tom, was also close to his character. Loach spotted him in a pub and started his acting career but the truth was Bindon had links the the London underground and wasn’t a very nice man. He famously dated Christine Keeler, the former Playboy "Bunny Girl" Serena Williams and Vicki Hodge who would later talk of her 12 year violent and abusive relationship with him. He had sex with Princess Margret too, she denied it but the photos taken proving it have long been the stuff of Royal scandal of years. He also got away with murder – literally. It has become a classic kitchen-sink melodrama and a slice of working-class history. The story works because it is never judgmental – we are all frustrated by Joy’s poor choices but so many people make the same, no one has ever not made a bad decision, it’s just that some are effected by them more than others. Joy is a victim of circumstance and a poor education and isn’t 100% to blame for her mistakes. It’s a classic that still divides audiences today.