Why Ken Loach hasn’t made a decent film since Kes

‘If you want to send a message,’ said Sam Goldwyn, one of the men who invented Hollywood, ‘try Western Union.’ It is such a well-known remark one might have thought every film-maker of the past 50 years would have acted upon it. Not Ken Loach. After half a century of fighting the good fight on behalf of the poor, down-trodden working class, the grumpy Oxford graduate releases his latest film this week. Don’t all rush at once.
Jimmy’s Hall, it will surprise nobody who has followed Loach’s work over the years to learn, pits an Irish socialist recently returned from America against the local priest. The screenplay, as ever with Loach, comes from the fair hand of Paul Laverty, who is usually described as a Scottish ‘human rights campaigner’. Wake up at the back! They’re doing this for your benefit.

Yes, Loach is once more at his exercise. And once more the critics will roll out the usual phrases to honour him — the grand old man of British cinema, our very own iconoclast, and such like. The one word you won’t read, because it is considered poor form, is ‘bore’. Yet that is what he is. Loach is no heir to Powell, Lean, Hitchcock and Reed. He is a one-man wind farm.

To give him his due, he seems, a month before his 78th birthday, to have got the message. Speaking at Cannes last week, he said he wasn’t sure his films had deepened people’s understanding of working-class lives. Though, naturally, it wasn’t his fault. ‘They cannot stand working-class characters who speak with some knowledge,’ he said.

In this case ‘they’ were film critics. From what he has said in the past, however, it could be anybody. Americans, Zionists, Conservatives: Loach feels oppressed by them all.