'A Kind Of Loving' is another of those great kitchen-sink dramas set in the north of England. Featuring Alan Bates as the 'angry young man' who imagines - like so many young men - that he is going to go places and do things... Growing-up, getting married, buying a house and starting a family - there has to be more to life than this? All he sees are disaffected people who have done no more and now expect the same of him.
This was my decade. Bates played a character maybe 10 years older than me. I empathised with his every passionate resentment. When I saw that he was a draughtsman; I scorned the very prospect of a job for which I myself was being groomed.
There are lots of extremely well-observed scenarios. Thora Hird plays the vixenish protective mother-in-law-to-be with a malignant flair that only she could muster. June Ritchie is apt as her nubile air-head of a daughter. There were plenty of 'em in the '60's. Thank heavens for emancipation. Lots of other great British character stalwarts feature. We see our hero wrestle with the growing dilemmas of sexual desire, his futile embarrassment whilst attempting to purchase contraceptives. Why didn't he go to the barber's, for heaven's sake? There's a glimpse of seduction that embodies fear, desperation and guilt that is the best advertisement for sex-education.
This is an excellent movie that is an almost perfectly observed slice of lower middle-class life during the early 1960's. It contains no radical ideas, but was extremely radical in their presentation. For a whole generation, this was what 'coming of age' was really like.
Recommended.
This was my decade. Bates played a character maybe 10 years older than me. I empathised with his every passionate resentment. When I saw that he was a draughtsman; I scorned the very prospect of a job for which I myself was being groomed.
There are lots of extremely well-observed scenarios. Thora Hird plays the vixenish protective mother-in-law-to-be with a malignant flair that only she could muster. June Ritchie is apt as her nubile air-head of a daughter. There were plenty of 'em in the '60's. Thank heavens for emancipation. Lots of other great British character stalwarts feature. We see our hero wrestle with the growing dilemmas of sexual desire, his futile embarrassment whilst attempting to purchase contraceptives. Why didn't he go to the barber's, for heaven's sake? There's a glimpse of seduction that embodies fear, desperation and guilt that is the best advertisement for sex-education.
This is an excellent movie that is an almost perfectly observed slice of lower middle-class life during the early 1960's. It contains no radical ideas, but was extremely radical in their presentation. For a whole generation, this was what 'coming of age' was really like.
Recommended.