Ken Loach’s Poor Cow from 1967 – his debut film, in fact – now looks more than ever like his key early masterpiece. It has an extraordinary freshness and openness, and an effortless scene-by-scene swing in the story that hardly seems like a story at all. To see it rereleased on the cinema screen after 50 years is a vividly detailed time-capsule experience. Its artistry is only augmented by its archival interest, and it was all I could do not to stand up and try to walk forward into the screen, like Alice through a kind of looking glass, and enter a London not so very different from Dickens’s – especially the staggering tenement scenes – or even Henry Fielding’s. Every shot shows how Loach and his cinematographer Bryan Probyn had an extraordinary eye for ambient period detail. I suffered the opposite of Pavlovian salivation at the cafe menu offering “Liver, Bacon and Chips”. I remember eating liver and bacon. When did the British decide to stop doing that? Why did we decide to start doing it in the first place?
The title itself (the invention of screenwriter and original novelist Nell Dunn) is a masterstroke of deadpan irony and tragedy: a despairing insult born of pity and condescension, hurled at women by men, or at women by themselves. Carol White plays Joy, who gets married to career burglar and domestic abuser Tom (John Bindon). He is sent down for a bungled robbery; the chaotic arrests are dramatised, in the nearest we’ll get to a Ken Loach action sequence. So Joy takes up with Tom’s fellow robber Dave, played by Terence Stamp, as handsome as a young George Best. Of course, poor lonely Joy has other gentlemen friends when Dave goes inside too, and she gets presents of money – but the film never judges her, nor treats the idea of prostitution as anything other than a fact of life. White is superb, and so is Kate Williams as her friend Beryl – the Miranda Hart of her day. The opening childbirth scene, the pub scene, the “model” scene with the leering photographers – all superb, interspersed with intertitles as interesting as anything Godard managed. This has to be seen on the big screen.
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