A Kind of Loving (1962)
Directed by John Schlesinger

Film Review

The grim realities of everyday life in Britain of the late 1950s, early 1960s was a subject that a new wave of British filmmakers took to their hearts, and in doing so helped to bring about a renaissance in British cinema around this time.  Mirroring France's Nouvelle Vague, this new breed of British film auteur had an immediate and lasting impact on the landscape of British cinema, and their so-called 'kitchen sink dramas' would prove popular not only with the critics but also the cinema-going public.  At the time, Britain was beginning to emerge from a long period of austerity that dated back to the end of the Second World War, and whilst living standards were steadily improving, housing was in short supply, wages were low, and career options for the young remained few and far between.  To compound this misery, the old moral values were still in force - sex before marriage was frowned upon, abortion was illegal and any man who put a woman in 'the family way' was expected to marry her at once, whether he loved her or not.  The high divorce rates seen in later decades have a lot to do with the social strictures imposed upon young people of this time.

It is these harsh facts of life circa 1960 that director John Schlesinger preserves for posterity in his sombre but highly engaging debut feature, A Kind of Loving.  Based on a novel by Stan Barstow, the film was sensitively scripted by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, who would also collaborate with Schlesinger on his next film, Billy Liar (1963), which deals with similar themes, from a slightly more humorous angle.  Like his British New Wave contemporaries Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson, John Schlesinger tacitly avoids sentimentalism and moralising.  Instead, he shows us life as he saw it in the early 1960s, with young people muddling through as best they can, constrained not only financially but also by the morals of an older generation from which they feel increasingly alienated.  "They don't know they're born" is how these old timers judge their erring offspring, assuming that because they are materially better off than their parents were at that age they have no reason to be less happy.

A Kind of Loving presents a far messier kind of romantic entanglement to that which cinema audiences (accustomed to the Hollywood 'happy ending') would have been used to at the time, but it is one which is unquestionably far closer to the reality experienced by most young people becoming acquainted with the facts of life.  Its two protagonists Vic and Ingrid - faultlessly interpreted by Alan Bates and June Ritchie - are a man and a woman who clearly have no deep feelings for one another.  What they call love is no more than pure animal lust, and once the biological function controlling their actions has been accomplished the only thing that keeps them together is a hollow pact called marriage.  Without this empty social convention, and the parental pressure that makes it binding, Vic and Ingrid would gladly go their separate ways as soon as they have been spared the obligation to bring up a child.  Not only do they have nothing in common, they have no appreciation of the other's feelings and seem to resent their differing social backgrounds.  (Ingrid's mother - an absolutely monstrous Thora Hird - considers herself vastly inferior to Vic's parents because she lives in a semi-detached house, owns a television set, and can afford to pay some poor wretch to clean her windows.)  It is what society expects of these two completely mismatched individuals that forces them to stay together and try to find 'a kind of loving', although the likelihood is that one will end up beating the other to death.

Schlesinger's social realism is of a somewhat gentler hue than Tony Richardson's, but the frustrations and bitterness of a disenfranchised younger generation, whilst not spilling over into outright anger, are never far from sight.  Like all young people of their age, Vic and Ingrid want only to be free and happy, but these are the two things that an absurdly moralistic society denies them.  Once Vic has got Ingrid 'into trouble' (of course, it's always the man's fault and only the man's fault) he is as free as a murderer who has handed himself over to the police.  Before he knows it, the shackles are on and he is serving the first stretch of his life sentence, penned in with a wife he can barely stand and a fire-breathing mother-in-law he would gladly burn at the stake if witch-burning was still a socially acceptable preoccupation.

There's no pathos, no attempt by the writers, director or actors to make us shed any tears for the young man who has made his own private hell and his equally egoistical wife, but their plight still moves us because it is something we can so easily identify with.  So naturalistic are the writing and performances that Vic and Ingrid look more like real people in a documentary than characters in a fictional drama - ordinary beings of flesh and blood learning to live according to what society expects of them and what their own circumstances will allow.  There is a tart, wistful poignancy in the ending, a hint perhaps that it will all turn out right in the end, but the overriding impression is one of mourning for all those lives that have been blighted by society's narrow conception of respectability.  The bleak urban landscape adds the right note of solemnity to the film, reminding us that paradise lies elsewhere, not in the smoky deprived wastelands of England's industrial north.   Schlesinger's penetrating debut film resounds not with anger but with the grudging sadness of a pilgrim being forced down a road he'd rather not travel, to a place of despondency he knows his soul will not bear.

Film Synopsis

Vic Brown is a draftsman at an engineering factory in a Lancashire town in the northwest of England.  In his early twenties, he still lives with his parents in their terraced house but has hopes of moving away and making his fortune elsewhere.  Then Ingrid Rothwell, a girl in the typing pool, catches his eye.  Whilst the attractive blonde is not the kind of girl he'd ever thought of marrying, Vic just can't get her out of his head.  Ingrid is equally taken with Vic, and after a few awkward meetings they are kissing and professing love for one another.  Ingrid isn't yet ready to begin a physical relationship but the mutual attraction becomes too strong to resist.  Vic is shocked when, not long afterwards, Ingrid confronts him with the news that she is pregnant with his child.  Vic has no choice but to do the decent thing, which is to marry Ingrid against his wishes.  Unable to afford a place of their own, the couple move in with Ingrid's punctilious mother, who makes no attempt to disguise her contempt for her son-in-law.  Vic appears unmoved when Ingrid has a miscarriage and he aggravates his mother-in-law further by going on a pub crawl with a friend.  His marriage now looking as if it is well and truly over, Vic returns to his family, but finds no sympathy from that quarter.  It is up to him to sort out the mess that he has made of his life...