This was the first 'grown-up' (guess these days you can't use the word 'adult' as you should be able to) film I remember seeing. I put the profoundly moving effect it had on me down to my tender (15) years. So after around 42 years, I saw it again this week - I had reason to screen it for my Film Studies class... and it's still quite wonderful.
At the centre is an earthy and moving story of the central character, Jane's, single pregnancy. But Jane is not a scatter-brained bimbo who stumbled into pregnancy, she is a sophisticated 27-year-old French woman, whose virginity was becoming burdensome. But this is the late-50s and social attitudes to single pregnancy are wholly different from those of today.
The film details Jane's 'go it alone' strategy, as she moves into a grotty boarding house occupied by a bunch of unremarkable misfits. Though this 'kitchen sink' drama seems, for much of its length like an 'issue' film, it is, ultimately, triumphantly not. There is a black trumpeter (Brock Peters) who doesn't experience racism, and nearly destroys Jane's budding relationship through his judgemental moral attitudes. There is an ageing lesbian music hall artist (Cicely Courtneige) who isn't ostracised. There is a prostitute (Patricia Phoenix) who doesn't have a heart of gold, or an exploitative pimp.
In other words, this is a moral tale that refuses to preach. And at the centre of this is the curious and heart-warming theme of all of the well-meaning people (well, some of them are well-meaning) who Jane meets who want to help her abort her baby.
Our interest is, for much of the film centred on the relationship between Toby (penniless writer) and Jane, a relationship that we will to succeed. But in the end, it (probably, as the ending is to some extent inconclusive) is not this relationship that we treasure from this film, but the sense, made, oh so movingly, in the final scene, that Jane has, through her hardship and the friendship of people whom she would previously have dismissed, become a much fuller person living in this hovel than she could ever have become in the cosy bourgeois bosom of her parents.
For this reason, and others, this is a truly subversive work. No wonder it left so great an impression on me, at the tender age of fifteen, living in my council flat with my very respectable parents in leafy Sevenoaks...
At the centre is an earthy and moving story of the central character, Jane's, single pregnancy. But Jane is not a scatter-brained bimbo who stumbled into pregnancy, she is a sophisticated 27-year-old French woman, whose virginity was becoming burdensome. But this is the late-50s and social attitudes to single pregnancy are wholly different from those of today.
The film details Jane's 'go it alone' strategy, as she moves into a grotty boarding house occupied by a bunch of unremarkable misfits. Though this 'kitchen sink' drama seems, for much of its length like an 'issue' film, it is, ultimately, triumphantly not. There is a black trumpeter (Brock Peters) who doesn't experience racism, and nearly destroys Jane's budding relationship through his judgemental moral attitudes. There is an ageing lesbian music hall artist (Cicely Courtneige) who isn't ostracised. There is a prostitute (Patricia Phoenix) who doesn't have a heart of gold, or an exploitative pimp.
In other words, this is a moral tale that refuses to preach. And at the centre of this is the curious and heart-warming theme of all of the well-meaning people (well, some of them are well-meaning) who Jane meets who want to help her abort her baby.
Our interest is, for much of the film centred on the relationship between Toby (penniless writer) and Jane, a relationship that we will to succeed. But in the end, it (probably, as the ending is to some extent inconclusive) is not this relationship that we treasure from this film, but the sense, made, oh so movingly, in the final scene, that Jane has, through her hardship and the friendship of people whom she would previously have dismissed, become a much fuller person living in this hovel than she could ever have become in the cosy bourgeois bosom of her parents.
For this reason, and others, this is a truly subversive work. No wonder it left so great an impression on me, at the tender age of fifteen, living in my council flat with my very respectable parents in leafy Sevenoaks...