Dir.
Steven Woodcock, 2005, UK , 87 mins
Cast:
Jason Merrells, Denise Welch, Mairead Carty, Marcia Warren, Roy Walker, Judy Flynn
And now for something of a throwback to the days of the British kitchen sink drama, when men wore their cardigans with pride and binge drinking for the ladies meant a sherry with a shandy chaser on a Saturday night at the legion.
Halcyon days they might well have been, at least for the British cinema. They saw a glittering array of fresh talent emerging from the windy dales and moors of the North. The working class invasion was led by the likes of Albert Finney,Tom Courtenay and Alan Bates. It was the age of John Osborne's angry young man. Being 'posh' suddenly counted for nowt,unless you wanted to read the BBC Nine O Clock News.
So here we are some 40 years on with a gritty yarn created by John Braine, one of the 'sons' of that grey era. Braine became a household name and re-defined the modern English novel with Room At The Top in 1957. The internecine emotional verbal war between brash, social climbing Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) and the monied golf club set the tone for the class warfare rife throughout the Post-War Blighty.
The final scene of the movie with the trapped, lost Lampton and effervescent, unworldly Susan Brown (Sears) heading off into the Sunset for a lifetime of romantic stagnation was the talk of the not so swinging late Fifties.
At first sight The Jealous God, filmed entirely on location in West Yorkshire and East Lancashire , has the feel on a TV pilot, the kind of not-an-inch-above-the-knee tut-tutting you hear regularly in an ITV drama series on a Sunday night. But director Woodcock, creating his second movie through his company North Country Pictures, has greater pretentions. Though he focuses on the conflict between sex and faith from Braine's 1964 best seller, it's as though he's trying to swim the Channel without getting his feet wet.
Teacher-cum-would-be priest Vincent Dungarven (Merrells) is his anti-hero, a lower working class small town lad battling against his staunch Roman Catholic upbringing and his tyrannical mother (Warren) . His brother, played by Andrew Dunn, is an under-achieving drunk while his lusty sister-in-law (Welch) wants to 'de-frock' him at almost every opportunity. Enter vivacious Laura (Carty) from the library, who lures him into her bed while announcing that her first husband, played by Robert Duncan, is not fully out of her life. Can the charming likely lad with the soiled halo survive the stigma of associating with a known divorcee
If the moral tone seems slightly dated that's because it is, no matter how much Woodcock tries to dress up the action. Sadly, he has the wrong lead in the lightweight Merrells, best known through the TV series 'Cutting It'. Here is an actor with all the passion of a milkman trying to sell an extra pint. While Carty oozes sexuality and Welch steals every scene as the vamp in the pinny, Judy Flynn has a fine hour or so as Laura's bitchy chum Ruth. There's also a gem of a cameo from TV game show host Roy Walker playing our man in the confession box, the Monsignor.
North Country Pictures, with former set designer Woodcock and his wife Julie at the helm, has already struck some excellent chords through their first feature Between Two Women. Set in a Yorkshire mill town in 1957, that also dealt with suppressed sexuality and a forbidden love affair between two women. The filmmakers proudly point out that by the time the credits rolled there hadn't even been a single kiss. Nothing gratuitous there then.
Maybe that's where Woodcock has got it wrong in adapting Braine's work. Peering through the cobwebs, The Jealous God purports to lift the lid on old fashioned passion and desire but Woodcock badly needed to generate more steam in the bedroom department to lift this parable off the ground.
Ivan Waterman
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