Mapping Cinematic Norths

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Figures

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DAVID FORREST AND SUE VICE

Archival Traces of the North in Barry Hines’ Looks and Smiles (1981) and Threads (1984)

The Barry Hines archive is held at the University of Sheffield’s Special Collections. It is a rich resource comprising Hines’ own research materials, newspaper articles, ephemera, letters, notes on meetings and draft or annotated versions of finished texts, as well as unpublished or unperformed plays and screenplays on such varied topics as the Miners’ Strike of 1984–5 and the National American Soccer League of the 1970s. Its contents enables a number of points of exploration into the work of this important but underrated working-class writer, and his oeuvre of Northern English post-war British film, television and literature. Hines is best known for his second published work Kestrel for a Knave (1968), most widely experienced in its filmed guise as Kes (1969) directed by Ken Loach. Given the prominence that Loach would go on to enjoy, it is fair to say that Hines’ formative role in this exploration of childhood, class, education and the North has been somewhat underplayed – Hines, it seems, has been a victim of the discursive emphasis on filmic auteurism and his later works have not received the attention they have deserved. One of our aims here is to begin to redress this critical imbalance.

This chapter explores two of Barry Hines’ most important screenplays, Threads (Mick Jackson, 1984, BBC) and Looks and Smiles (Ken Loach, 1981), and suggests that by augmenting textual analysis with archival methods and insights, we might enable a stronger case for a renewed critical exploration of the writer’s dynamic creative output. At the heart of this reassessment we argue, is the importance of region, specifically South Yorkshire in the North of England. ← 17 | 18 →

‘Why not go to London?’: Looks and Smiles and Barry Hines’ Sheffield

In the case of Looks and Smiles, the Barry Hines Papers archival holdings reveal not only the background detail of the film’s construction, but also the complex intersection of its regional setting with its thematic concerns. The film’s action takes place in Sheffield, and focuses on the effects of the recession in Britain in the early 1980s, in particular youth unemployment in the North of England (see Figure 1.1). As David Etherington and Martin Jones observe, the numbers of those in employment in the Sheffield region ‘declined by a staggering 12.4% between 1981 and 1991’,¹ and it is the gathering ‘storm clouds’, in Hines’ phrase, of mass youth unemployment that are represented in the film.² Hines’ sense of the urgency of charting this impending decline led him to abandon his original plan to depict the young protagonists of his drama ‘in their first jobs after leaving school.’³ Indeed, not only are the young characters themselves unable to find work, but those of their parents’ generation are threatened with redundancy.

The film’s plot concerns Mick Walsh (Graham Green), a fifteen-year-old motorbike enthusiast whose efforts to gain work on leaving school are unsuccessful; his schoolfriend Alan Wright (Tony Pitts), who enlists in the army and is posted to Northern Ireland; and Mick’s girlfriend Karen Lodge (Carolyn Nicholson), who works in a shoe-shop, although her aspiration, as she tells Mick, was to have been ‘a nursery nurse’, had her qualifications been better. Karen’s embattled relationship with her mother (Cilla Mason) prompts her to seek out her estranged father (Arthur Davies), who brought the family from Newcastle to Sheffield but has since moved on. Such a synopsis itself reveals the cost of living in a recession, since the notion of ← 18 | 19 → signing up as an alternative to signing on and the necessity of leaving home and family in the search for work, are clearly thematized.

Figure 1.1. Looks and Smiles: Opening.

Although Hines is described in contemporary correspondence as ‘first and foremost a novelist’,⁴ Looks and Smiles was originally commissioned in 1978 by the production company established after the success of Kes, Kestrel Films, as the screenplay for a feature film to be about ‘being young in very difficult times: no work, meeting girl or boy, trouble at home’.⁵ The fact that Hines conceptualized this story from the outset as a screenplay rather than a novel suggests that it was an important step in the development of his role as Ken Loach’s collaborator, and his starting to assume the role of writerly auteur. The archive shows that, as the process of filming developed, ← 19 | 20 → Hines and Loach together made central decisions: both took part in the casting interviews, as well as fact-gathering meetings with unemployed teenagers and with former soldiers who had served in Northern Ireland. As is customary for Hines’ and Loach’s collaborations, the film’s roles are taken by non-professional actors: Graham Green, who plays Mick, was an apprentice fitter at a colliery, Tony Pitts, playing Alan, was an apprentice mechanic, and Carolyn Nicholson, who takes the role of Karen, was an A-level student from Newcastle. Apart from Pitts, who has since appeared in Emmerdale (ITV Yorkshire 1972-) and Red Riding (Channel 4, 2009), the film shares with such neo-realist films as Vittorio da Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves (1948) a depiction of efforts to escape economic hardship in a big city, the toll taken on family members, and actors who neither were, nor became, familiar. In Looks and Smiles, recessionary Sheffield takes the place of da Sica’s post-war Rome.

During the process of Hines’ composition of the screenplay, it started to seem possible that, in his words, ‘finance for the film [would] not [be] forthcoming’.⁶ The reasons for this are hinted at by correspondence in the archive from prospective backers, one of whom, Victor Sandelson, puts forward his view of the script as offering material for a ‘fine and moving television play’ but not a feature film. Although in this context it meant not funding it, Sandelson appropriately identifies the screenplay’s televisual elements in terms of the centrality he accords to the writer, and what he calls its ‘moving social and political protest’.⁷ After rejections such as this, and in case it did not otherwise ‘see the light of day’, Hines ‘turned the script into a novel’, which was published by Michael Joseph just before the film’s release.⁸ Hines was able to return to the screenplay in 1980 after funding was secured by Irving Teitelbaum of Kestrel, in association with Black Lion Films.

In its final film version, the details of Looks and Smiles’ two narrative impulses, the love-story and the recession, are intertwined, such that each is expressed in the terms of the other, and its political meaning is ← 20 | 21 → conveyed through personal relationships. Indeed, the film’s title, which quotes the phrase used in Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina (1878) by the Princess Scherbatskaya, to describe to her daughters the notion of an unspoken romantic agreement,⁹ both ironizes the more everyday courtship of Mick and Karen, whose ‘looks and smiles’ are exchanged in a Sheffield nightclub, and points to a more general conception of social codes and implications which are hard to decipher. In an early overlap between romance and recession, Mick and Karen’s first date is nearly ruined because he has yet to receive his weekly giro payment; later, their growing closeness, as well as a reminder of the education both have given up, is expressed in a scene in which Karen helps Mick practise equations for his interview as an apprentice fitter. Mr Lodge’s departure for Bristol, a detail that draws on the fact that in the 1980s unemployment in the South remained lower than in the North of England,¹⁰ is a sign of both personal and work-related disruption, since we learn that, as well as having a new partner and child, he is a long-distance lorry-driver, work which typifies travel and dislocation. As Richard Benson puts it, in Looks and Smiles we see how ‘unemployment is breaking up old communities and ways of living’,¹¹ emphasized in Hines’ original plan for the film to end with the departure of Mick himself from Sheffield.

In his handwritten notes for the film’s production pitch, Hines addresses the reasons for setting Looks and Smiles in Sheffield, revealing the fact that such a choice relies on a mixture of pragmatic and symbolic factors. ‘I live here’ is the first reason Hines gives, followed by a revealing series of notes about the city: ‘Industrial areas: mining, steel: no need to go ← 21 | 22 → anywhere else: unemployment developed rapidly since I started the script’.¹² Thus the Sheffield setting is an ironic one. As Hines’ notes imply, in the past all work opportunities existed in the city itself. Sheffield’s industrial heritage is emphasized in the film’s opening shot of factory chimneys (see Figure 1.1), and in its representation throughout of engineering shop floors and steelworks. Yet in 1981 these locations offer no employment for young people. Mick’s motorbike, which he buys with the proceeds of theft from a pub, symbolizes in part his thwarted ambition to be a mechanic, but also the imperative of getting away.

In his production note, Hines claims that at times of economic downturn it is ‘difficult to separate family conflict’ from ‘social conflict, especially within [a] working class’ setting. Unlike the ‘wealthy’, working people are not ‘cushioned’ from economic realities; rather, ‘marriage, relationships