The Gorbals Story

First off, the person complaining about "thick Glasgow accents" has obviously never hear a Glaswegian speak in "their native tongue" as the actors in this were speaking "drama school Scottish" with no accent of any kind, if they did speak Glaswegian of course very few outside of Scotland would understand much of what was being said, not a good thing for a film of course.

The poor living conditions were not an exaggeration of any kind as conditions then, and for many years later, were really that bad, several documentaries are available on youtube to watch.

An extremely gritty kitchen sink drama featuring a few actors who would go on to bigger and better things, one of them played Little John in the 1950s TV series Robin Hood.

Very stagy and fairly artificial film version of a play of the same name. With the kitchen sink dramas still a good few years away - and I often wondered who was Scotland's answer to Arthur Seaton, Frank Machin and Jimmy Porter? - this was as cutting edge as social commentary was allowed to get.

I'm not going to be too harsh here. Yes, everyone speaks with an Aberdeenshire accent; the tenements look like facsimiles, with none of the filth and grime; the pacing's slow and the acting is variable. However, it was good to see earlier roles from Russell Hunter, Andrew Keir and a couple of others. Some second unit photography of the Saltmarket, The Clyde and the dance halls captures the spirit of the times.

In a couple of ironic twists, I wonder how this feature was received by the local on its release - The Gorbals had over twenty cinemas in the area back in those days, and it was shown back in 2015 in the Citizen Theatre.

Moreover, the action (presumably) takes place a stone's throw from Crown Street, epicenter of the seminal Glasgow novel 'No Mean City'; there's an adaptation we're still waiting for nearly 90 years later!

Excellent performance by isobel Campbell and truly wonderful and interesting dialogue

Although it will be of almost no interest to anyone, this piece of social realism based on a 1946 play by a left-wing Glasgow theatre group is still a curiosity. It's a shame that probably we'll never know why such a parochial drama by an unknown playwright was deemed worthy of filming. A lot of people live cheek by jowl in a tenement apartment. It seems likely that many of the cast (never heard of again) were repeating their stage roles. They're not awfully good and generally they speak nice drama school Scots rather than the raw Glaswegian we'd expect. There's a fair amount of theatrical make-up on show. The house-mates include an Indian (who appears to be played by a Jew with an accent that wanders too regularly into Welsh) and inevitably a struggling artist desperate to escape the Gorbals squalor. There's much talk of poverty but the drama only comes to life when an irate father finds his daughter sitting on the artist's lap. The mediocre writing is a very long way from Steinbeck or Miller. Apart from establishing shots, the entire film was shot at London's Merton Park Studios. This robs the film of any hope of realism.

A relentless tale of poverty driving people mad featuring the Glasgow Unity Players set almost entirely in a cheerless tenement that anticipates Bo Widerberg's 'Raven's End' just over a dozen years later.

Both films make their bleak content tolerable by letting us know it all happened a long time ago, and 'The Gorbals Story' sugars it's pill by first showing us the young hero as a successful artist who eventually escaped this teeming hellhole; thus reassuring us that his story, at least, had a happy ending.

Young leading actor Russell Hunter later became famous on TV as "Lonely" in 'Callan'. Other faces in supporting roles that later became familiar belong to a young Roddy McMillan, Archie Duncan and Andrew Keir.