Picspam - Girl on Approval (1961)

[lost_spook]

I watched this the other day and felt the need to picspam (though it's in b&w and doesn't even have David Collings). Anyway, it's a film starring Rachel Roberts and James Maxwell and it's one of the British "kitchen sink" oeuvre. (Or New Wave, the booklet calls it.) So, just think, I can painlessly give you a piece of British film and social

Comments

[vilakins]

That sounds incredibly progressive for the time!

I don't know Rachel Roberts, but she shines out of these caps.

[sallymn]

The only thing I've seen her in is Picnic at Hanging Rock... which of course meant that I expect her to turn nasty in everything :)

[vilakins]

I've seen that, but years ago.

[lost_spook]

It was incredibly progressive, yes. Not only tackling a topic like that in a realistic way, but just in showing an ordinary lower-middle class couple who struggled to pay for their house and couldn't afford a television. (That just didn't happen on screen, outside of comedies). It's part of a relatively small group of films that were revolutionary in British cinema, because they showed mundane and lower-class families, were often set outside of London and the Home Counties, and were about difficult issues. It partly came out of theatre (those I've seen before - Saturday Night & Sunday Morning, Room at the Top and A Taste of Honey - were all originally plays, and two of them part of the 50s 'angry young man' thing as well) and the growth of independent studies after the break-up of Ealing (so I understand). Of course, they all look pretty stilted and mild these days

[vilakins]

How sad. Did she have a Welsh accent in that film? Actors back then seem to have been trained to speak in that very clipped newsreel-type voice unless they were being perky Cockneys.

Did you study film?

[lost_spook]

I know. (That bit was in the booklet that came with the DVD; it was nice and cheerful and told me the director died aged 67, Rachel Roberts aged 53 and James Maxwell aged 66.) And, yes, she used her Welsh accent. These films also had people using regional accents and things! (Soooo shocking. ;-D)

I didn't, not really! I just did Media Studies A-Level, but we did the 1950s in some detail, and that seems to be one of the bits I remember the most. Also when I was 11 an English teacher randomly made us do A Taste of Honey at school. (I'm not sure why a teacher would think that was a good play to make 11/12 yr olds study, but I got quite taken with the film version - because it was all black and white and fog and canal paths and children's songs as incidental music.)