Cathy Come Home
- Episode aired Mar 28, 1969
- 1h 15m
A wedding. Happy and promising. A young couple, new to the ways of life. The joys of parenthood: A dream comes true. Then the first incident in a long, spiraling chain of events, and down th... Read allA wedding. Happy and promising. A young couple, new to the ways of life. The joys of parenthood: A dream comes true. Then the first incident in a long, spiraling chain of events, and down they go. No job, no money. Moving from house to house, each smaller than the last. Hope is b... Read allA wedding. Happy and promising. A young couple, new to the ways of life. The joys of parenthood: A dream comes true. Then the first incident in a long, spiraling chain of events, and down they go. No job, no money. Moving from house to house, each smaller than the last. Hope is briefly found, But fate strikes again under a cruel word: Eviction. The family flees. A car... Read all
- Director
- Writers
- Jeremy Sandford
- Ken Loach(uncredited)
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaAt an anniversary screening of the film, Ken Loach spoke of how the play had become an important part in making the debate on homelessness public. At the same event his producer, Tony Garnett, pointed out that the number of homeless in Britain had more than doubled "but Ken [Loach] and I now live in much more expensive houses."
- Quotes
Cathy Ward: You don't care. You only pretend to care.
- ConnectionsFeatured in Television: Play Power (1985)
The story of Cathy and Reg, played by Carol White and Ray Brooks, echoes the tragedy of thousands of couples and families who found themselves entangled in unexpected complications within the most basic prospect of finding a house. It's set in 1966 and since the war, not enough houses were built to help people building their future and asking for one could be a soul-crushing experience. Well, it wouldn't be a Ken Loach movie if the ending didn't leave your heart overloaded with a mixture of anger and sadness.
Now, some detractors would label such a film as leftist propaganda, but Loach handles emotions very carefully and never lets them guide Ray and Cathy's actions, subduing them even in dramatic situations. And as if he was anticipating the objections, he lets voice-over do the job and some anonymous speakers explain how they ended up in a squalid house, an overcrowded building or a caravan, and also some well-dressed council or welfare workers explain the 'housing crisis' in words Cathy can understand.
Really it's a matter of arithmetics: so many demandants in the waiting lists for so few houses, some would technically have to wait for 350 years to get one. With facts such as these, a movie doesn't need a stand: filming reality is enough. And Loach with the power of his 16mm camera explains that this is an ordeal endured not by vagabonds or social misfits but working-class people, men who worked as miners, bus or lorry drivers, even military veterans. This is the Loachian approach as it would define his movies from "Cathy Come Home" to "I, Daniel Blake", half a century later (when things hadn't improved much).
Loach's oeuvre isn't that lengthy political leaflet but rather a Human Tragicomedy ("tragi" underlined) à la Balzac where people from Cathy Ward to Billy Casper, from Joe Kavanagh to Daniel Blake were such relatable embodiments on the realities underwent by the lower-class citizens that calling them fictional would be an insult. And that's because Loach was lucid enough to know that you can't just drop numbers and statistics on the nose and expect a visceral reaction: the disclaimer that concludes the story wouldn't have one tenth of its impact if it wasn't for the image of a distraught Cathy after she lived the ultimate tragedy, her devastation and confusion give their weight to the conclusion.
In fact, the ending -almost cynically- negates the impact of the story by saying that this tragedy was just one among the others, leaving the skeptical viewer alone with his own conscience. The narrative approach of Loach illustrates the infamous comment of Stalin that "one death is a tragedy, a million is statistics". By handcuffing an individual tragedy with the numbers, Loach directs a manifesto against the drawbacks of the English so-called welfare system. The story of Cathy becomes a portmanteau to hang all the absurdities of the housing crisis: flats that wouldn't allow children, councils blaming people over their homelessness or kids being thrown off a house because of insalubrity, but without any place to go...
Loach is also aware that he's dealing with people we conveniently feel sorry for but yet consider them, if not deserving, at least guilty for lack of anticipation. But for the most compassionate of us who wonder at the sight of a poor drunken beggar in the subway "how did he end like that?" Ken Loach shows us that the sliding toward poverty is easier than we'd presume: an accident, a death, unexpected pregnancy not to mention Kafkaian bureaucracy ... you don't need to go high to fall hard. And Cathy's nightmare is a succession of sequences that hardly last longer than one minute, giving you the vertiginous impression of someone climbing down spiraling stairs so fast the fall's inevitable.
She hitch-hikes from her rural town, she meets Reg, he makes her laugh, they marry, manage a flat that don't accept children, she's pregnant, he's got an accident and it goes downhill after that. It's interesting that the use of background music (the opening credits and "Stand by Me" during the romance) is abandoned once the troubles begin and the film turns into a gripping documentary-like experience. From panoramic shots on promiscuous places to much tighter images of three or four people in the same frame, Loach conveys a sense of claustrophobia that is quite effective and makes you feel like an intruder, which is the essence of militant journalism, showing the kind of reality we wouldn't want to see.
Handheld cameras like for true TV reports allowed Loach to give a realistic effect but not always deprived of cinema's vital artifices. The first powerful close-up is on an elderly man who's sent to a nursing house and the sadness on his face while his wife talks to the social worker speaks a thousand words. Naturally, the camera is more in love with White's beauty and the slow erosion of her youthful idealism. White's simply spectacular as the poor mother of three who comes from various psychological stages until she loses the grip on her emotions in the jail-like emergency homeless shelter. Her change of personality is like a subplot within the tragedy and the final nail on the coffin.
"Cathy Come Home" is the work of a director with a social conscience, cinematically absorbing and with the relevance of a historical document, a tragedy not deprived of ironies not the least is that a country where people's jobs can't allow them to get houses still permit jobs that consists of evicting them... when they do find a house.
- ElMaruecan82
- Sep 22, 2021
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- Runtime1 hour 15 minutes
- Color
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- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1