The Gamekeeper

It would be easy to dismiss "The Gamekeeper" as a minor Ken Loach film. It does not generate quite so intensely the anger and frustration that are the hallmarks of this most politically conscious director's finest works such as "Ladybird, Ladybird" and "My name is Joe". Its canvas is small. It concentrates on a single character whose interactions with others, including his family, are usually treated as brief vignettes. There is almost a documentary matter-of-factness about the way the gamekeeper's everyday work patrolling the woods of a country estate, where nothing much happens apart from encounters with trespassers, is recorded. And yet, perhaps because of its austere and unswerving glimpse of a single character's attitude to his work and those around him, the film is anything but smallscale. The character of George, the gamekeeper, is complex and enigmatic. He has taken the job as a result of industrial redundancy and, although not particularly happy with his lot, he sublimates his dissatisfaction in an almost fanatical determination to keep the woods free of intruders. He is not a man to be crossed as trespassers from small children to adults discover to their cost. And yet he is a man with a certain degree of moral ambivalance, not above a little bribery in kind when he wants his window frame fixed at the estate's expense. The climax of his year comes at the big autumn game bird shoot when lords and masters reappear from abroad. George, dressed for the occasion with jacket and tie, stagemanages the event with fruity language that earns the mild rebuke from the Duke of "not in the presence of the ladies". We are in deepest "class" country here. But perhaps the most telling moment in the film occurs much earlier when the gamekeeper's wife complains of her lot, a townswoman trapped in the boredom of country life. As this is something her husband is unprepared to face, he attempts to justify everything. It is one of Loach's most chilling reminders of the plight of those unable to escape from "the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate" situation that continues to haunt Britain to this day.

My review was written in September 1980 after a press screening in Times Square:

Ken Loach's latest film, bankrolled by the ATV television network in Britain, is a perceptive study of a young gamekeeper and family man toiling on a private estate. Trapped within a class system as rigid as in feudal times. Eschewing the cute and dramatized approach of the local "Country Matters" tv series, Loach treats his material with the tough, direct social realism which marked him as a director of stature a decade ago in "Kes".

Phil Askham, a personable seeming nonactor, portrays the title character. Going his rounds at raising pheasants, trapping and hunting rabbits, escorting the lords on grouse hunts and watching for poachers. Though his wife (a solid, no-nonsense turn by Rita May) and village pals understandably grumble about the paternalistic system run by the wealthy landowners, Askham is an outspoken supporter of the established order. He treats both poachers and trespassing children to stern lectures on respecting private property.

Only one scene, with Askham chatting up a neighbor on his tractor, reveals the repressed hostility of the gamekeeper, as he declares: "we'll have to get rid of 'em; they won't give the land away", in reference to the wealthy lords of the manors.

Loach's simple directorial style and way with his players, especially the always believable children, make for a subtle, though austere film. Ace lighting cameramen Chris Menges and Charles Stewart bring to life a green and brown rural paradise, bolstering the pic's theme of complacency preventing a revolution. Lack of dramatics and Loach's uncompromising use of sometimes unintelligible local accents limit this fine film to tv and college circuit usage.