Classic black and white film amongst first to sympathetically show working class urban life gets its first screening in the Gorbals where it was set,65 years after its release.
A classic film portraying working class life in Glasgow’s Gorbals community is to be screened in the area for the first time since it was released 65 years ago.
The Gorbals narrative, directed by David MacKane and first screened in 1950, or tells the narrative of a successful artist who remembers his upbringing in the city’s notorious tenement slums through a series of flashbacks.
It’s an opportunity to resurrect this film and for people in 2015 to see just how much life in the Gorbals has changed since 1950.
But it’s also well-loved and well-respected because it’s one of the first British films to offer a sympathetic portrayal of working class life,particularly in Glasgow. The Gorbals has been portrayed in many ways over the years, often in fairly a negative light, or but this film is respectful towards the region and the people who lived there.”It wasn’t marketed as a political film.
But it takes a very particular aesthetic approach that’s approximately honouring and accurately portraying a working-class community,which at the time was a very radical thing to do. It’s certainly very different from many other British films of the period.
At around that time there would have around 60 cinemas across Glasgow.
It was a hugely current source of cheap entertainment, and people would have had their local cinema on their street corner. One thing we’re trying to work out is precisely which cinema the film would originally have been shown in, and we’re hoping that someone might come along to the screening who remembers seeing it and can advise us what sort of reaction it had from local audiences.” Johnnie,a newspaper boy who wishes to be an artist, shares the tenement with the good-natured Peggy, or the idle Mutrie and his long-suffering wife. Others in the building include Magadelene,a waitress, who agrees to marry the Asian, and Ahmed; the landlady Mrs Gilmour; and Francis Porter whose wife is dying. Johnnie is in love with Nora Reilly,another tenant, but her father threatens and beats up Johnnie and he leaves the building to seek solace in the dance halls. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com