Latest / Secret Movie Club Podcast / SMC Pod #213: Ken Loach & his 1969 masterpiece KES

Transcript

SMC Pod #213: Ken Loach & his 1969 masterpiece KES · Secret Movie Club Podcast

0:00
Hello, Secret Movie Clubbers, and welcome to Secret Movie Club Podcast 213,
0:07
Ken Loach and the 1969 British masterpiece, Cass.
0:22
Under Programmer of Secret Movie Club, it is wonderful to have you.
0:26
This podcast will air on March 20th, and we are actually going to take three weeks off.
0:34
And so the next podcast after this one, Secret Movie Club Podcast 214,
0:40
which is actually going to be a case study.
0:43
The first time we've ever done a case study of a movie. And that movie is Casablanca,
0:48
Michael Curtiz's masterpiece from the early 1940s, a movie that often needs no introduction.
0:55
But what's fascinating about that film is nobody thought it was going to be a hit.
1:01
No one thought it would have the lasting cultural legacy it's had.
1:05
And it was a movie that behind the scenes was.
1:09
Was a mess. That is when we come back. That'll be Secret Movie Club podcast 214.
1:15
Why are we going dark for three weeks and coming back mid-April?
1:19
The reason is when we come back, I want to have our season done and scheduled.
1:25
Well, maybe not done, but I want
1:26
to have it launched. And I want to be talking to you about new events.
1:31
And April is the beginning of our 10th anniversary.
1:35
We We actually showed our first movie roughly 10 years ago, April 15th, 16th.
1:42
I should look up what the actual day was, 2016.
1:45
So it'll have a lot of import that time, mid-April.
1:50
So that also gives me a few weeks to just get this done.
1:54
So we will be back April 17th with Secret Movie Club Podcast 214.
1:59
I hope in the intervening weeks, you'll take a look at our back catalog.
2:03
We now have over 200 podcasts.
2:05
When COVID hit, we actually did a number of radio shows with actors,
2:11
which, you know, be curious to hear what you think about them.
2:15
I love radio. I love radio drama.
2:17
So we have those. If you didn't know about those, just go back and look around
2:21
March, April, May, June of 2020, and you'll hear our radio shows.
2:27
Today, we are going to talk about Ken Loach and his 1969 British masterpiece movie, Cass.
2:34
As always, if you are just, if you're new to Secret Movie Club and you're like,
2:39
what is this? What is this Secret Movie Club thing?
2:41
Go to secretmovieclub.com. Wait a few moments. Get on our newsletter.
2:46
You can follow us at Secret Movie Club. We've got socials.
2:51
Instagram probably being our most looked at one right now. That's at Secret Movie Club.
2:55
You can email us, community at secretmovieclub.com. We work to respond to everybody.
3:00
And that way, if we do our job, when we come back mid-April,
3:05
you'll get the newsletter, you'll hear about the events, and you'll be part
3:09
of our 10th year anniversary. And we'd love to have you.
3:23
1969 British movie, Cass, directed by famed British filmmaker Ken Loach.
3:29
Still relatively early in his career, Loach made what's probably going to be
3:34
his last movie just a few years ago.
3:36
So he's been making movies for decades and was very productive,
3:41
was making a movie one every two or three years minimum.
3:45
So he's got dozens of dozens of films.
3:48
Interestingly, Kess, which is a movie about a working class British teen named
3:54
Billy, who has a real rough home life,
3:57
lives in an industrial English town in the 1960s and develops an interest in
4:03
learning falconry and finds a baby hawk, a kestrel,
4:09
raises it, gets books from the library, learns how to train it,
4:13
learns how to do falconry.
4:14
And what comes from that is often considered Loach's best film.
4:19
So I feel, you know, sometimes when you get into a director,
4:24
you want to save what most people consider their best film for at least a few films in.
4:29
Sometimes you see the best film early. I ended up seeing it first,
4:32
but there are many, many Ken Loach films just before, after,
4:37
all the way through the 2000s that many people talk about being great.
4:41
I have a friend who's really into Ken Loach And he gave me a number of great recommendations.
4:47
Let me set up Ken Loach in the film.
4:51
Let's talk about the movie. And then I just want to talk about that phenomenon
4:56
about why I don't you may be totally different.
5:00
I know whoever you are listening to this podcast, you may approach movies completely differently.
5:05
But I want for the last part of this to look at why, why did I wait?
5:11
And can you force yourself to watch someone like I still haven't seen a number of movie makers?
5:16
And should I just, you know, whether I'm in the mood or not,
5:19
just start watching their like movies to make sure that I get them in?
5:23
Or does it make sense that you wait till you're in that mood?
5:26
You really want to see it. And maybe there's a reason for that.
5:29
Ken Loach really came into his own as a movie maker in the late 1960s.
5:37
He shares a lot of DNA with a number of movie makers around that time and a
5:43
little after in that he got his start in television.
5:47
He made a number of movies before he really started to get noticed.
5:52
So he really developed his craft.
5:56
Maybe his most famous movie before Cass was right before it,
6:00
a movie with Terrence Stamp, Terrence Stamp called Poor Cow.
6:04
Cass was a movie that really launched him, is a beloved British classic.
6:11
And then after that, Loach would be hit or miss, but he would rise to the level
6:18
of one of the most well-known British movie makers.
6:21
His movies often go to the film festivals, often go to Cannes.
6:25
I have won numerous awards.
6:28
What's interesting about Loach is he's often identified as a filmmaker with
6:36
great feeling for the working class and the conflicts of labor,
6:42
of the labor movement, of the industrialization and post-industrialization period
6:49
in Britain, of the struggles of poor and working class British people.
6:54
But beyond that, really looking at economic systems, the influence of British
7:03
social and government and civic systems.
7:05
But he did branch out as he gained more and more confidence and renown.
7:09
He made movies here in Los Angeles. That movie is called Bread and Roses.
7:14
He made movies about Ireland and the Civil War in Ireland.
7:19
I think that movie is called The Wind That Blows Through the Barley or The Wind Through the Barley.
7:22
And he really, but the
7:25
commonality in a lot of his movies was looking
7:29
at people who engaged in some act of working class activism or protest or war
7:39
or rebellion or radicalism or looking at people living in the systems and the
7:46
effect of those systems.
7:47
And Cass certainly fits in that. Now, what.
7:53
I always shied away from, and I'll talk about this more in the third part,
7:57
was being blunt with myself, I would always read the synopses of Ken Loach movies
8:04
as they were coming out since I was a teen in the 90s.
8:08
And I would go, huh, I don't know if, like, that might be a little preachy,
8:15
or I don't know if I need to be, I don't, you know, it's hard to explain.
8:19
I love great movies. I try to watch movies from all over the world.
8:25
I try to like cinema is cinema. Good cinema is cinema.
8:28
And I try to watch it all. And it's been very interesting.
8:32
I've gotten in trouble, not real trouble, but I've pushed back.
8:36
I've seen pushback from our audience when I actually don't realize the socioeconomic
8:42
climate of the countries of movies I love. give you an example.
8:48
I was a big fan of a two Brazilian movies called Elite Squad and Elite Squad 2,
8:56
which I thought were really Elite Squad 2, maybe a little more than Elite Squad,
8:59
but were really interesting films about police forces dealing with gang violence
9:07
in the Flavelas in Rio de Janeiro.
9:10
And my sort of foundation or understanding of those films was thinking about.
9:16
Our moment in the 1980s, 1990s. I've told this story many times.
9:21
I'll be very quick about it. My folks divorced in 1983 when I was six.
9:24
My dad was really into action movies. And once the divorce was done,
9:28
he would just get whatever he wanted.
9:29
And my sister and I loved it, even though we were probably way too young to see it.
9:33
And so we watched all these action movies, Predator, Die Hard.
9:38
Red Dawn, Beverly Hills Cobb 1, 2, you know, the canon movies,
9:44
Chuck Norris movies, Invasion USA, whatever, Jean-Claude Van Damme,
9:49
Bloodsport. My dad would get it. We would watch it.
9:51
And I have a soft spot for that kind of action movie.
9:55
So I came to Elite Squad through that prism of like, oh, yeah, I get it.
10:01
OK, this is this action movie, which it is really amazingly directed action.
10:05
And it's told from the point of view of a.
10:08
Police officer, which I was used to from 80s action movies.
10:12
But when I did research to write about the movies and I posted them,
10:17
I realized that those movies were very controversial because
10:21
many Brazilians viewed them as tacitly endorsing a very right-wing or far-right-wing
10:29
approach to Brazilian politics that would eventually be embodied by the now
10:35
jailed Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro.
10:39
And even though Elite Squad 2 tried to address that, it clearly,
10:45
Elite Squad 2 is about government corruption and political corruption.
10:50
So the police turn from fighting the poor flavella criminals to fighting the
10:56
corrupt political criminals. It's still very controversial.
11:00
Not, I think, I think actually on a more intense level than Dirty Harry,
11:04
but I think Dirty Harry would be Clint Eastwood.
11:06
Don Siegel's Dirty Harry would be a good equivalent of a movie that sparked
11:10
a big cinema debate as well about,
11:13
you know, is this just a great movie or does it is it problematic because it
11:17
endorses a very far right view and approach to law and order?
11:22
That was very chastening to me.
11:26
But at the same time, I worry equally because I love Soviet cinema and Soviet
11:31
sci-fi and Eisenstein and Tarkovsky.
11:34
And I will often write about Eisenstein movies from the 1920s and 1930s,
11:39
like Strike, October, the old and the new.
11:42
And, you know, I also can feel it from the other side. I get it from the other side.
11:47
It's funny to see how many people are threatened when you write about movies that are viewed as...
11:52
Progressive or quote-unquote woke or whatever, it's really unfortunate to me
11:58
to see the racism online because whenever I write about Black films or films
12:02
made by Black filmmakers,
12:04
I always get trolled by these white guys online who seem really threatened by
12:11
it and seem to think that if you write about a Black film,
12:15
you're just catering or pandering instead of having the courtesy to watch the
12:20
film and just realized it's a great movie.
12:22
Like, you know, The Killer of Sheep by Charles Burnett, just a great movie, period.
12:27
You do the right thing, Malcolm X, he got game, bamboozled, whatever.
12:31
Yeah, they're controversial, but they're just great movies made by a great filmmaker, Spike Lee.
12:36
But, you know, when you're in cinema, you're going to take it from all sides
12:40
and you just deal with it. And that's that.
12:43
So this is all a long pretext to say that for whatever weird reason.
12:47
Every time I read the synopsis of a new Ken Loach movie, I was like, ah,
12:52
I don't know if I really want to watch him out like a janitor strike or I don't
13:00
really know if I need to see this movie about a working class alcoholic.
13:05
And I think maybe the worry was that it would give too much into what I assumed,
13:12
which is always a mistake.
13:14
Would be a kind of British kitchen sink miserablism.
13:19
And, you know, you got to be in a mood for kitchen sink British miserablism
13:23
of any kind. And I just made that assumption.
13:25
So cut to never saw a Ken Loach movie.
13:29
And finally, I'm trying to just watch as much cinema as I can with as much time as I've got.
13:36
And I just was like, it's time for Cass. I've just heard too many good things about Kes.
13:41
I keep seeing Kes pop up over and over again. It's about a boy.
13:45
I have a real affinity for movies that capture childhood, honestly,
13:50
as I'm sure it has to do a little bit with being a product of divorce and seeing
13:55
childhood a little through the prism, like many filmmakers who maybe come from
14:00
divorced or whatever backgrounds, you know, you grow up in a different way.
14:05
And also there's alcoholism in my family and a lot of family drama and mental
14:10
health and other things like that.
14:12
So when you see a movie that might really look at it with empathy and honesty, I love those films.
14:19
And so all of it finally clicked in my 40s. I'm like, let's watch.
14:31
Let me give you the synopsis of Cass, talk a little bit about the movie makers,
14:35
and then dive into the movie.
14:37
The headline here is, it is incredible.
14:41
It's one of the great movies, certainly one of the best British movies I've ever seen.
14:46
But I don't even like talking about national cinema that way.
14:49
It's just a great movie, a great movie of world cinema.
14:51
The premise is, and I already touched on it lightly, but I'll tell you this
14:55
story without any spoilers.
14:57
Just watch the film. I'll get up to the point where I think a spoiler would spoil it, and I'll stop.
15:02
We meet a working-class boy who's probably 14, 15, named Billy.
15:08
He lives with his mom and his brother. He and his brother share a bed.
15:13
Billy has got a job. He delivers newspapers. We can see he's a bit of a juvenile
15:17
delinquent, although, you know, you don't feel like he, you know,
15:22
but he steals. He steals milk. He steals money.
15:26
He steals certain things on his paper route. He doesn't pay a lot of attention
15:29
in class and school. You can see he's a bit of a lost soul.
15:33
And at home, you can see that there's a lot of drama.
15:37
He's got an older brother by quite a bit. His older brother,
15:40
Judd, is already working in the mines.
15:42
You can tell you're in a British mining town.
15:45
And Judd is fighting with the mom. He still lives at home.
15:50
The mom and Judd go out on Saturday nights, you know, to socialize.
15:55
And Billy is, for all intents and purposes, a latched key kid.
15:59
And for whatever reason, he's walking in a field, sees a kestrel,
16:04
realizes, which is a baby hawk.
16:06
And this whole movie is based on a novel, A Kestrel for a Knave.
16:10
And the writer of that novel co-wrote, co-adapted his own novel for the movie,
16:16
along with Ken Loach and another writer. and Billy goes to the library and his
16:22
interest is sparked in something and it is falconry.
16:25
So he gets the books. He learns about falconry.
16:28
He takes from the nest a baby hawk, puts it in a coop near his flat, near his apartment,
16:36
and bit by bit actually trains it effectively and gets to the point where the
16:43
Cass, and he calls the baby hawk the Kestrel Cass, where he gets to the point
16:48
where he doesn't even have Kess on a string.
16:51
Kess will fly, will come to him. He feeds Kess. And it's really impressive.
16:56
And at school, a teacher asks him to talk about what he's doing. He really lights up.
17:02
But there is tension at home and there's tension with his brother and his mother
17:09
is, you know, just trying to keep things afloat.
17:12
And all of these strands are going to collide. And I'll stop there.
17:16
The movie is shot by Chris Menges, great, amazing cinematographer.
17:22
A movie where Menges' work really shines in my, I mean, it shines in so, so much work.
17:27
But one of his later works that I really like is the Sean Penn movie,
17:31
The Pledge with Jack Nicholson.
17:33
That's a Chris Menges shot film with some just incredible cinematography work there.
17:39
Menges was the cinematographer here.
17:42
Loach is the co-adapter, the director made in Britain for British audiences.
17:48
And the part of Billy is a real revelation. And it's played by David Bradley.
17:55
And unlike the way that American movies would sometimes handle the same thing,
18:00
David Bradley is not like a 20 year old playing a 14 year old or whatever.
18:04
He is a 14 or a 15-year-old playing a 14 or a 15-year-old.
18:09
The movie and its style, it was really fascinating to me.
18:15
It's not documentary-like, but it has elements of,
18:22
it seems very important to Loach to situate the movie in the town and for us
18:29
to get a feel for the town.
18:31
And but he does it very organically so
18:34
we know there's a mine we can see that
18:37
it's an industrial town south yorkshire just incredible
18:41
world building which has a
18:45
documentary feel to it but there is a real empathy for the characters there's
18:51
also a playfulness and this was the big uh revelation to me uh in the middle
18:56
of cast there's a hilarious sequence where it's just a pe class a fiscal education class,
19:02
and Billy's playing, they're all playing football or soccer,
19:05
as we call it, on the pitch, on the field.
19:07
And they make Billy the goalie. And as the game's going on, you can tell that
19:14
the coach is kind of a blowhard and he wants to win and he's playing.
19:19
And whenever one side or the other scores a goal, they flash a super title about
19:24
who's winning like it's a game and it's a.
19:29
It's a stylistic touch, could possibly not have worked, could have been jarring
19:33
because you felt you were watching a near cinema verite movie, which it's not.
19:37
And I think the reason the stylistic that flourish works is the movie is not cinema verite.
19:43
It's like a poetic realism.
19:46
It feels like there's a little neorealism in it, like a British neorealism,
19:52
a real feel for character.
19:55
You definitely feel that Ken Loach, Mike Lee, who would really come up just
20:00
after Ken Loach in the 70s and then really blossom in the 80s and the 90s,
20:04
there is an equal feeling for people.
20:08
But there is just enough poetry.
20:11
I don't know how to explain it, but it is poetry. But it's a working class poetry
20:16
that it allows for that moment.
20:18
And you're like, why not? There's also tremendous sense of earned humor in the
20:23
movie, which I wasn't expecting.
20:25
I also made the wrong assumption that I thought Ken Loach was going to be a
20:30
little too self-serious.
20:31
Sometimes I feel that left-leaning directors who, you know, want to wave the
20:40
flag or talk about the party or what have you.
20:43
There's a self-seriousness about it that affects the cinema,
20:47
that makes it a bit of a slog.
20:50
And I unfortunately thought maybe that was going to be Ken Loach.
20:54
And it was not. It's not in Cass.
20:57
Everything is done organically. Everything is through character.
21:02
It didn't feel like a movie that had a thesis and then shoehorned the characters
21:08
and the stories to prove the thesis, which I think is filmmaking I don't love
21:13
and doesn't reflect life.
21:15
Instead, it was a movie that felt like, yeah, that totally could have happened.
21:20
The characters, I think those are all characters. You know, Billy's older brother,
21:24
Judd, is not a very likable character.
21:28
And yet we have empathy for him because we see, like, what choices does he have?
21:34
He you can see also in the movie and the movie does an amazing job of this,
21:39
how the school system works.
21:41
And it's a public school system because the mom is not a rich mother.
21:45
It's not an academy. It's not a boarding school.
21:48
And I have heard that this issue of class is often front and center in British
21:54
minds and in British cinema, even more so than we can ever pick up.
21:59
If we watch a lot of British cinema or study British history or whatever,
22:03
it's just very different than if you're there.
22:05
I've heard people like Michael Caine and other Brits talk about how you know
22:09
someone's class and where they're from immediately by their voice.
22:13
Anybody who's British or English would watch Kes and probably understand a thousand,
22:19
two thousand, four thousand percent more than I understand when I see it.
22:23
And yet, as a compliment to Kes, as a dumb American who doesn't understand the
22:29
intricacies and the nuances of the socioeconomics and the class and all that,
22:35
you still understand and so much is communicated, which is what great movies do.
22:40
You know, you don't have to be Chinese to understand what Chen Kaige is talking
22:45
about in Farewell, My Concubine. And that's really, to me, the genius of the film.
22:51
And I'd be very curious to watch other Ken Loach movies to see if this is the
22:55
genius of all of Ken Loach, which is that the movie is very inside out.
23:01
It's very character based at the same time that it has a very strong story.
23:05
There's a very strong story structure to it, and it does build up to a third-act
23:11
confrontation that you see in really good, muscular stories and scripts and novels.
23:17
Because we're with Billy and Ken Loach is nonjudgmental, but he's also not—.
23:25
An ideologue the way I thought he would be. He doesn't idolize Billy.
23:29
This is a thing that I always feel is the death knell of anything good when
23:34
somebody idolizes a race or a group of people or a class of people or pulls
23:41
their punches because of a political affinity or a sociopolitical affinity.
23:46
And often, you know, people call this virtue signaling. When people want to
23:50
virtue signal their understanding or their empathy for an oppressed class or whatever.
23:55
You often see movies that deny the very people they're trying to celebrate their
23:59
humanity by making them these one-dimensional,
24:02
you know, it's what you often hear people talk about with white filmmakers and
24:07
that whole strain of movies where there was what they called the magical Negro,
24:11
like the legend of Bagger Vance and other movies where a white filmmaker wants
24:18
to make this movie about the Black experience and then ends up being afraid
24:22
to show just people in their full humanity.
24:25
And you get these characters that are silly, don't reflect life,
24:29
and it becomes a kind of reverse, unintended but clear, still, racism.
24:35
What I loved about Kes was you don't know what's going to happen to Billy.
24:40
You don't particularly love Judd, but you can see why Judd, the older brother, is the way he is.
24:45
You can see the mom has a tough time with her two boys, but you can see that
24:51
she's got her own issues and her own problems, as any woman, man would.
24:57
But you don't know that you would do any better in her situation,
25:01
raising those two boys. And there are there are also characters that you admire, you like.
25:07
There's a teacher who wants to see Billy not get shoehorned and go into the mines like Judd.
25:14
And he sees that there's a intellectual curiosity in Billy and he wants to bring that out.
25:20
And now that's a trope. You know, the teacher we've seen that movie,
25:23
the teacher who helps the working class kid or the poor kid.
25:27
And there's probably a reason why so many movies like that are made.
25:30
But Loach handles even that archetypical character, who now is almost a cliched character.
25:36
He handles that character. It just feels like a real person,
25:39
feels like a real teacher who just happens to still care.
25:43
And I think it works because there's also a very comical headmaster who you
25:47
understand why he is probably the way he is. But he's very gruff. He's always dour.
25:51
He's always yelling at the kids. He's always bringing the kids in his office.
25:54
And weirdly, you can also see that Loach understands the importance of contrasts.
26:00
And you see that, too, in you'll see the mining scenes or the working class
26:06
pub scenes or the working class public school scenes.
26:10
But then you'll see Billy out in the fields with Kes and these lyrical moments.
26:15
And you feel his freedom.
26:17
You feel the weight lift off his own shoulders.
26:20
Final thing I'll say about the movie, because you should just see the movie.
26:24
It's also, and this may come from the novel. I'd have to imagine it comes from the novel.
26:30
It is also an impressively allegorical and symbolic film.
26:36
And again, whenever anybody employs allegory or symbolism, there's always that
26:42
danger that it's going to be heavy-handed or not work or be look at me, which it often is.
26:48
And here it's right at that line that I've always admired and loved where the,
26:55
It's not in your face, and you might not even think about it at the beginning,
27:00
but I love the movie so much, and I thought about the movie,
27:05
and the movie stayed with me,
27:06
that you realize that Billy's taking of a baby hawk,
27:12
a kestrel, from a nest, from its mother,
27:16
and putting it in a coop and training it is an allegory for what
27:25
the British society is doing to him.
27:28
And it's done with a very light touch, but it's very powerful. It's very powerful.
27:35
And please just see the movie. It'll be a revelation and a discovery for.
27:51
I don't know that this doesn't have to be super long. I did get to thinking,
27:55
why did it take me so long to see Cass?
27:58
And there are so many filmmakers that are on that Ken Loach list,
28:02
like the Dardenne brothers. I've heard about Dardenne brothers movies.
28:06
They've won Palme d'Ors. They're very famed filmmakers. I've never seen a Dardenne brothers movie.
28:12
It was only a year or two ago that I finally saw a Bella Tarr movie when we
28:16
screened Satan Tango and it blew me away.
28:19
I excuse me. I have not seen a lot of Osmene Sembene movies from Africa. I would love to see them.
28:25
I've only seen one, and I want to see more.
28:29
I haven't seen a lot of, man, I'm going to not say his name correctly,
28:34
so forgive me, Manuel de Oliveira.
28:36
I hope I'm saying that close to how it should be pronounced.
28:40
Portuguese filmmaker who made movies. I'm not sure he's still making movies.
28:45
I think he may have just passed, but was making movies into his nineties.
28:48
I've never seen, uh, any movie by Jacques Rivette from France.
28:54
I've never, I haven't seen a lot of Claire Denis movies.
28:56
I've only seen one Claire Denis movie and so on and so on.
28:59
So there are all these movie makers that you hear about that,
29:04
uh, other movie makers talk about.
29:07
And you're like, I know you're always like, I know I need to see that filmmaker.
29:11
You know, if I'm, if I'm really about cinema and I really want to have a broad
29:16
education and a broad toolbox, I've, I've gotta, I've gotta at least watch one
29:22
or two of this movie makers movies.
29:24
And, but that thing comes where there, I don't know if it's the same for you.
29:28
There's something in your belly or your heart. It's kind of in that area.
29:33
Thorax, the thoracic chest cavity area and the gut, maybe even a little in the
29:38
crotch where you just go, yeah, today's the day I'm in the mood,
29:44
right? People say that all the time.
29:45
I'm in the mood. I'm not in the mood for that. I'm in the mood for that.
29:49
And most movies I'm in the mood for.
29:52
I'm just about to start another Soviet sci-fi film, a Soviet sci-fi comedy.
29:58
And I've just been on that. I've been on a Soviet sci-fi kick and let's do it.
30:02
And then just before that, I watched William Wyler's The Heiress, which blew me away.
30:06
And I was in the mood for that. And I do like to try to bounce around and jump
30:10
around rather than really sort of holing down into one genre or one thing for too long.
30:18
But nevertheless, I've thought about watching a Dardenne movie, and I have not.
30:24
I've thought about watching a Jacques Rivette movie, and I have not.
30:28
I've thought about watching a Manuel de Oliveira movie, and I've gone on to something else.
30:33
And that was the case with Ken Loach.
30:36
Now, the interesting thing, following this through to its honest,
30:40
logical conclusion is I didn't immediately jump and watch other Ken Loach movies.
30:46
The last filmmaker I really did that with was about a year ago,
30:50
maybe a little less, maybe eight months ago.
30:52
I really dived into Rossellini, Roberto Rossellini, and he was probably the
30:59
biggest discovery for me in a few years.
31:02
And I was asking myself, why did it take me so long to get to Rossellini,
31:07
Realm Open City, Paisan, Germany Year Zero, Stromboli, Europa 51, Journey to Italy?
31:16
Those were the six movies that I did, Little Flowers of St. Francis.
31:19
Those were the seven movies I saw.
31:21
And I love them. I love them all. And he's now one of my favorite directors.
31:26
And I can't say that the same thing happened with Loach.
31:29
I watched Cass. I loved Cass.
31:32
I didn't necessarily think I've got to now watch five to 10 other Ken Loach
31:38
movies, even though there are easily five to 10 other Ken Loach movies that
31:42
people consider great to world class.
31:45
And I suppose maybe, if I'm teasing this out, same thing happened to me with
31:51
Jonas Mekas recently. I'd never seen a Jonas Mekas movie.
31:54
And I saw Walden, which I think originally was called Notes.
31:58
Sketches, Sketchbook, something like that.
32:01
From 1969, avant-garde, poetic diary, kind of Stan Brakhagey,
32:07
but not fair to call it that. It's its own thing.
32:10
And I loved it, but I didn't immediately feel like I got to watch everything Jonas Mikas has done.
32:15
And what's interesting is Jonas Mikas and Stan Brakhage were contemporaries,
32:19
both made avant-garde movies.
32:21
When I saw one Brakhage movie, I had to see 30.
32:24
I didn't necessarily have that same reaction with Mikas.
32:27
When I saw one Ross Salini movie, which was Rome Open City, I immediately had
32:31
to see a bunch of other ones.
32:32
When I saw one Ken Loach movie, I didn't necessarily have to immediately go out and see a.
32:39
It may just be ultimately personal, you know, whatever your vibe is and your
32:46
frequency is and your cinema level is,
32:48
you just notice the people you're resonating with and you notice the people that you love.
32:55
You love their movies, but it's maybe not necessarily a style that you feel
33:00
you're going to draw from a ton. I don't know. We will see.
33:04
There are, I'm going to just name them right now, more for me than for you.
33:08
Land and freedom To the 1995 Spanish Civil War Poor cow Poor cow.
33:16
With Terrence Stamp, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, about the birth of the
33:21
Irish state, Riff Raff, which would probably be the one I would see after Cass, and then Cass.
33:28
So, and all those sound super interesting to me. So there you go.
33:33
Maybe those are the ones I need to see next.
33:35
I will leave you with, you can see Cass right now on streaming. I saw it on Tubi.
33:40
I did not love the commercial breaks, but, you know, you can just hit pause take a moment.
33:48
They're not unbearable. You're back to the movie pretty soon.
33:52
They don't cut the movie at all.
33:54
So it's a great way to see these movies if they're hard to get elsewhere.
33:59
And I was blown away by Kess.
34:02
And I think the thing I do take out of it is you can just show people how they are.
34:08
And if you trust that, and you have to have a talent for it,
34:11
you have to have a talent for bringing it out in performance.
34:15
And you have to have a talent in knowing what it is that you want to bring out
34:18
and what's going to add the colors that you need.
34:21
Ken Loach clearly has those talents. And that's probably what I took out the
34:25
most from cast, which is incredible film. Please see it.
34:32
Okay. Thank you, Secret Movie Clubbers.
34:36
I am now going to go into the cinema minds and work to launch our season in
34:43
April, come hell or high water, come hell or high water.
34:46
It'll be exactly 10 years from when we started, and I will be back with Secret
34:52
Movie Club Podcast 214 on April 17th, Friday, April 17th, three weeks from now.
34:58
We will be doing our first ever case study of a movie, and that movie will be Casablanca.
35:04
So we're going to look at how Casablanca got made, what was happening during
35:08
its making, the fascinating story about how the script was never completely done.
35:13
The there's a lot of infighting a lot of the actors were confused which is a
35:18
very common tale in movies you have you know so many cooks in the kitchen so
35:23
often that it is fascinating.
35:26
How many movies actually come out with a coherent vibe and feel and and yet
35:31
Casablanca is one of those examples that probably because a little bit of all
35:36
of that it it developed a unique vibe and tone,
35:42
but the finished product is a masterpiece. It's one of my favorite films.
35:46
A lot of people's favorite films, no newsflash there, but we're going to look at like, why is that?
35:51
Why did that furnace produce this movie?
35:56
And that'll be our first case study. In the meantime, I wish you all the best.
36:00
I hope you are fighting the good fight. You're running the race.
36:05
You're keeping the faith. I send you all my best.
36:08
I am going to do my damnedest the next time you hear me on the mic here for
36:15
a Secret Movie Club podcast to tell you, all right, here we go.
36:19
Here are the movies. Come join us. And in the meantime, my thoughts are with you.
36:25
Please keep your head up or keep your head down and get it done.
36:29
I mean, either way, depending on how you read it, but I wish you the best.
36:34
Thank you for listening to the podcast.