Where I’m from, this film has touched more people than you could imagine. The simple story of young Billy Casper befriending a Kestrel in a cruel world soars like its titular beast above its one-line plot and tells the story with such beauty, humour and pain that it has transformed lives and still brings tears to many eyes. Ken Loach has never been better in his marvellous direction. David Bradley offers the best child performance of all time, not just this decade. Brian Glover and Colin Welland (Oscar winning screenwriter of Chariots of Fire) both steal the show for long stretches as two of the chief teachers in Billy’s life, offering hilarity and humanity to a world so painfully bleak that it is sometimes hard to even look at. It is that perfect blend of poetry and realism that makes Kes the tremendous film it is. This blend can even be noted within the beautifully lyrical promotional taglines for the film (which I have added throughout this article), that even in so many words manage to convey the depth of this very simple tale. Let’s get into the timeless power of Ken Loach’s 1969 masterwork Kes.

Credit

They beat him. They deprived him. They ridiculed him. They broke his heart. But they couldn’t break his spirit.

1969’s Kes is by all accounts a simple story about a boy and his bird. However within that story once can also find an indictment of the current education system, a portrayal of working class Yorkshire life and a study of hope against all else and the tragedy of when that hope is quashed. This was Ken Loach’s second feature film for cinema, following a series of many much-celebrated Television films. The film gains its plot and characters from Barry Hine’s semi-autobiographical novel A Kestrel for a Knave, based upon his own life in Barnsley in a mining town raising a kestrel. The deviations from real life occur as Hines turns himself into our lead Billy Casper. Hines father was a kind man, whereas Casper’s has long since gone, with his mother now pursuing another boyfriend whilst lamenting her current lack of marriage. Hines’s younger brother Richard raised a kestrel, whereas it is Casper that does so here, with his brother Jud being an ungodly brutish foe that eventually kills the bird in the film’s horrifying climax. It is this repeated ingesting of brutalism into this story of hope that makes it the piece it is. The frequent juxtaposition scene to scene of Casper going about his regularly dower chores, waking up at early hours for his paper round (money that has to go straight to his mother) before going straight to school and being subjected to some of the most brutal corporal punishment ever depicted on screen. Hines was himself a teacher and view firsthand the nature of English education at the time and so a realistic depiction of the hardships and cruelties of the system was another leading focus of his novel. The children in the film were as a matter of fact actually caned by the headmaster in the film (who was the real headmaster of the school where the film was shot). For this they were paid the equivalent of £8 for their pain. Although this sort of practise doesn’t fit into a modern practise, it does reflect in the documentary style that Loach was best at, the true horrors of education at this time. But the tears in Martin Harley’s eyes as the child caned as a victim of unfortunate circumstances is the hardest of all and his tears caught by Loach is one of the images most seared into my mind from viewing this as a small child.

Credit

He lies, cheats, steals, but has learned to survive... And doesn’t give a tupp’ny damn for anybody. But he cares about Kes.

David Bradley, our Billy Casper, is ultimately the biggest take away from the film, in his first ever acting role. Bradley won perhaps the most deserving BAFTA award for Most promising newcomer to Leading film roles that there ever was. Colin Weland as the kind-hearted and understanding Mr Farthing took home the films only other BAFTA win for Best supporting actor. Weland even taught in the school for a week, to better acquaint himself with the extras. Bradley performs with such a light touch that his amateur nature can be seen in some of the early scenes, but as the film goes on and the effect of the bird on the boy grows and grows, Bradley’s performance becomes more and more one of great nuance, whilst still never losing that chief joviality and childlike nature that makes the performance so exceptional. Weland is similarly touching as the one teacher that takes notice of Billy and gives him a chance, the two chief scenes of this are when he makes Billy tell the class about Kes and when he later comes to view the bird himself. His discussions with Billy perfectly emulate those student-teacher relationships that can and frequently do effect your lives for the better forever. Due to the unfortunate circumstances of their lives, that hope for better is quashed swiftly after. The other standout performance in the film would have to be Brian Glover as Mr Sugden, the gym teacher, so wickedly hilarious as he takes over the children’s football game to seemingly boost his own ego. But we also get the impression that the teacher is doing this to alleviate his boredom in what must be a pretty torrid life too. Sugden however goes on to alleviate this tedium by brutalising and humiliating Billy and Glover’s turn from light-hearted japer to brutal sadistic power abuser is a horrifying sight.

Credit

A lad with a mind of his own and a life he only shared with Kes.

But for as much as the tragedy of the film is its ultimate takeaway, one cannot seriously  underestimate the immense humour of the piece. As aforementioned, Glover’s football scene is one of all time comedic sequences for me and gets me every time, with its realism and irreverent humour aimed at all points at the self-important teachers and overly dismissive students. This sort of playfulness and humour is imbued into the film by Loach and furthered by multiple after-effects, including a brief sequence of Billy narrating a Beano comic and the superimposing of football TV scores upon the Glover P.E. sequence. Part of the film’s excellant humour from my end also comes from the exactness of the accents and dialects being depicted, so perfectly delivered because of their honesty. Afterall all of the extras and all but Colin Weland in the main cast, were hired from Barnsley. Loach’s anecdote goes that a group of American executives commented to him that “they could understand Hungarian better”. This ultimately led to a post-dubbing of the film with softened accents from all the key players. The American relationship with Kes has always been an intriguing one, even from its beginnings with Disney optioning an adaptation that Hines turned down, where the kestrel lived, completely undermining the pain and pathos of the ending of the novel and ultimately this film. American distributors similarly wanted a more upbeat ending, positing an epilogue with Billy getting a job in a zoo. I can only imagine the loss of effect if such an epilogue was stuck on the end of the otherwise pretty perfect narrative structure of this film.

Credit

Both wild... Both alike in their love of freedom and contemplations of the world around them. He called the Kestrel Kes, as he would a friend.

The ultimate tragedy of the film in its climax is what gives the film the resonance over so many decades.  The final sequence of Billy coming home to find Kes dead in a bin, so horrifically lifeless with its broken neck, before he comes in and confronts his brother Jud, who killed the bird. Billy’s outpouring of emotion and hurt is one of the most painful and horribly real images of pure emotion that for has ever been captured on film. Billy’s final response to attempt to beat Jud with the bird is the final straw for us as an audience as we come to terms with the fact that despite all the possibility of hope that that bird brought, it was largely superficial – Billy is inevitably bound to go down the pit and end up the same brute that his brother is. Freddie Fletcher’s Jud is around every corner, as perfectly depicted visually in the chase around the school sequence. Jud in the film is vulgar, oafish, abusive and seemingly heartless. One of Loach’s retrospective regrets with the film was this portrayal of Jud, feeling now that it lacked an acknowledgment of the hardships of work in a coal mine. I however feel that we understand the humanity of Jud through Billy, for we know that Jud had much the same childhood as Billy is having. Billy’s own dreaded fear of the mine too brings the hardships of it to an audience’s mind. Loach ends the film on a harrowing and haunting image, of Billy burying his dead bird, fading to black even before the burial is over. We get no final speech from Billy, we get nothing. We don’t even get to see the final dirt being strewn. We just fade to black and the names of those characters and actors that have so affected us for under two hours appear before us. A truly devastating and haunting ending, and film, indeed. 

-         -  Thomas Carruthers