The Gorbals Story

Poor, desperate degraded. Someone pushed to the limit. Uncaring governments in an area that has had many those. Thatcher and her croanys and all the other Tories that messed with Scotlands poorest areas. No wonder they away from the UK who can blame. A good film with a good dialogue on the conditions at the time. Not much better now. Well worth a watch.

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.

Being a native Glaswegian, I had a natural curiosity in viewing this vintage movie adaptation of a famous Scottish novel of the 40's, which I will own up to not having read. The Gorbals is a housing district in the centre of Glasgow and was until more recent times considered a byword for extreme poverty and its attendant features of alcoholism, violence and crime.

With an all-Scottish cast drawn from the Glasgow Unity Players, the hope was that this production would stay true to the tale and indeed to the underlying community they were seeking to portray, but sadly the film fails on many levels.

It begins from the safe vantage point of a now successful Glasgow-born artist looking back on his tough upbringing, the moral point presumably being I suppose that it's possible to rise above your station and live a decent life. It's like the viewer is meant to draw solace from this aspiration, missing the point really that hundreds of people continued, certainly at that time, to live in slums on or beneath the breadline. I doubt many of the real-life inhabitants found their way out at all, never mind through art.

So I didn't like the sugar-coated narrative, nor did I buy into the characterisations. No-one speaks as if they're from Glasgow, the vernacular sounds like you'd imagine the comic characters from The Sunday Post's popular The Broons or Oor Wullie cartoon strips to speak. Even as I accept that the broad Glasgow tongue would probably come over on screen as unintelligible to most anyone not born there, still these strange accents came over as very anachronistic. Plus, it wasn't even filmed on location, instead being shot in a London studio.

The situations are clichéd too, a wastrel husband almost wins the pools, there's a pub brawl and of course someone dies in their bed but there are a couple of other strands which perhaps in a different time and place, could have been developed further, one, a strong hint of domestic violence and possible rape and most unusually, an interracial romance between a young Pakistani man and a young Scots girl, which is most unfortunately despoiled by the use of casual racist terms which should stay buried in the past.

I really wanted to like this and there are some notable actors in the cast who would go onto future success mostly in TV roles, like Roddy McMillan, Andrew Keir and Russell Hunter, but with unimaginative direction, stagy acting and lame dialogue, I never for a second believed I was watching a slice of Glasgow life circa 1950.

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.

Excellent performance by isobel Campbell and truly wonderful and interesting dialogue