The Gorbals Story

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.