A Place to Go

Bethnal Green is changing. The row houses are being knocked down to put up high rises, and Michael Sarne's family doesn't know where they're heading. His father has lost his job as a dockworker, his brother's wife has just given birth to their first baby, and Sarne wants to see the world, but there's no money for travel, or much of anything, not even Rita Tushingham, whom he's sort of sweet on. So he and some locals plan to rob the factory he works at.

Basil Dearden's kitchen-sink drama apparently sat on the shelves for two years before release and it's easy to see why. With its depressing air, it hardly seems to presage the go-go 1960s. On the other hand, its anomie in the face of a brave new world that has no place for such people in't cuts a bit close to the bone for its intended audience. A lively performance by Miss Tushingham, a solid one by Doris Hare as Sarne's mother, contribute to the air that there's no satisfactory ending for anyone.

After reading the first review of this film I was tempted to say that the reviewer should have gone to Specsavers. Talking about 'the lovely Rita Tushingham' made me think this. She may have been a good actress, but lovely she certainly wasn't. Mike Sarne used this film as a vehicle to prove that not only he couldn't sing, but couldn't act either. The one saving grace for me as someone who worked in Bethnal Green around this time the film was made was the jogging of my memory of streets, neighbourhood and people long gone. The sight of Doris Hare belittling Bernard Lee at the family meal table was as embarrassing as the bedroom clinch they later shared. The scene where Lee sets light to the Christmas decorations is just laughable and how Sarne and Tushingham spent time canoodling in a derelict bombed out building probably running alive with rats was as ridiculous as casting John Slater as the local gangster. Like Lee who played an escapologist (not a very good one at that)who struggled to free himself of the chains he was bound by, I couldn't get out of the cinema quick enough!

A PLACE TO GO is an odd little blend of the classic British kitchen sink social drama and the more old-fashioned crime thriller that was popular a decade before and still doing the rounds even in the early 1960s, although this is very much a last-gasp attempt with the burgeoning popularity of the spy genre soon wiping away the trend for safe cracking and night time robberies.

It works better as a kitchen sink film than a crime thriller, because the heist itself, although the best part of the movie, is dealt with very hurriedly and doesn't take up much of the running time. Instead the viewer is treated to a slice-of-life drama involving a poor working class family presided over by Bernard Lee, cast against type as a street performer with a Houdini-style breaking chain act!

Pop star Michael Sarne is the idealistic hero seeking to escape from his drab existence. He hooks up with the inimitable Rita Tushingham, who proves to be more than a match for his wiles as her character is full of life and rather independent. She's the best actor in the whole thing, certainly showing up Sarne as a rather bland leading man (at least we get the likes of John Slater and Roy Kinnear who are rather more fun in delivering mannered supporting characters). The feisty romance scenes are rather well handled, although the pacing is a little slow and the crime elements feel rather unnecessary and tacked on to the story. Still, it's a perfectly watchable film for lovers of the era.

Very good story and fine acting from the dependable Rita T. And good evocation of late 50s/early 60s London.

It is not so much about the crime story as the social culture that is documented in Bethnal Green in the mid 1960s.

This isn't swinging London, this is gritty down to earth poor London.

The living conditions, the workplace and the desire for something better drives this film into something more than just another B&W also ran compared with the likes of A Kind of Loving and Taste of Honey.

It is summed up with the mother's observations of her life as she walked with her son down the street at the end.

The washhouse is a particular eye opener. This was only 60 years ago.