Throughout his prestigious career, Ken Loach has often cast comedians, understanding that they can bring a certain truth to their performances which trained actors cannot. Many of us are aware of Loach casting Lynne Perrie (Kes, 1967), Bruce Jones (Raining Stones, 1993), Dave Jones (I, Daniel Blake, 2016); some of us might also be aware that an up-and-coming John Bishop had a small part in Route Irish (2010). Little appears to have been written, however, about the cameo played by Mr Pastry in Loach's first full-length feature, Poor Cow.
There is a temptation to think that we are fully conversant with Loach's oeuvre - that we know what to expect from a Ken Loach film - yet watching Poor Cow in light of his more recent works we are taken by surprise. In Poor Cow we see Brechtian intertitles, we see characters seemingly being interviewed speaking to camera, we see lengthy cutaways away from the main 'action' suggesting a non-linear playfulness, we become aware of handheld camera work, and we see experiments with angle and focus; Poor Cow attempts at a poetic approach to filmmaking, that Loach's more celebrated later work does not. With Poor Cow we see the raw ambition of a young filmmaker; a young filmmaker fuelled by the early Czech work of Milos Forman, attempting to forge a poetic truth out of working class life.
Poor Cow saw Loach take the semi-documentary style which he had developed in television into the cinema and exploring its possibility. Key to this was improvisation. Whilst Nell Dunn had written a screenplay based on her novel, Poor Cow, Loach worked very loosely with it, as Terrence Stamp stated in interview:
"... (W)e didn't really have a script. That was one of the things that was interesting about it. It was just wholly improvised. He had the idea, he had the overall trajectory in his mind, but we didn't have a script. And, consequently, it had to be Take One because each of us had cameras on us. So before a take, he'd say something to Carol, and then he would say something to me, and we only discovered once the camera was rolling that he'd given us completely different directions. That's why he needed two cameras, because he needed the confusion and the spontaneity …!"
Similarly, Richard Hearne suggested that Loach allowed him complete artistic license for his cameo. At around that time, negotiations had broken down between Hearne and the BBC regarding his casting as Doctor Who; Hearne had been offered the role and wished to portray the Doctor as Mr Pastry, but BBC producers were unwilling to make that compromise. Ken Loach, on the other hand, allowed Hearne to bring his Mr Pastry persona to Poor Cow, and the results were startling.
Mr Pastry's introduction into Poor Cow comes 38 minutes in. The audience has just seen an intimate exchange between Joy (Carol White) and Dave (Terrence Stamp), in their shared flat, shot handheld in soft focus. Dave has returned from a jewellery robbery and murmurs to Joy, "The old lady was there after all, so we had to lock her in the closet - but we gave her a cup of tea before we left." Joy smiles fondly and tries on some of the stolen necklaces. There is then a jarring cut, and the audience is propelled forward in time to a court scene. Loach crosscuts between two static camera shots: a three shot of Dave in the dock alongside two unnamed accomplices, and a shot of the judge (Gerald Young) passing sentence. It is via the judge that the audience is informed that Dave had hit the said old lady's skull so hard that she became almost blind, and that he is to be sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment. A cutaway to Joy in the gallery shows her blank-faced. Wearing his iconic bowler hat, Mr Pastry then enters dancing The Lancers to escort the three men to the cells. He aims an extravagant kick to Terrence Stamp's rear, misses by some distance, and stumbles into the prosecution bench, knocking the prosecuting barrister's papers to the floor. It is telling that Loach chose to keep the obvious corpsing of the extra playing one of Dave's accomplices in the final edit. As the men are taken down, there is a second cutaway to Joy in the gallery; she gives an engaging smirk. It is at this moment that the audience realise that she had the inner toughness to survive.
Mr Pastry is next seen at a juncture in the narrative when Joy and her barmaid friend Beryl (Kate Williams) have agreed to engage in glamour modelling for amateur photographers in an upstairs room of a pub. For this scene Loach again employs crosscutting to evoke a sense of estrangement. The audience sees in close-up the broken faces of the older male photographers, their grins connoting a repressed lust; and separately, it sees the faces of Joy and Beryl obliging the men's requests, their smirks connoting a determination to retain agency. It is then that Mr Pastry is seen, comedically fighting his way to the front of the bevy of photographers - but it isn't a camera he is putting to his face, it is a sousaphone. There then follows a sequence of rapid crosscutting: close-up shots of Joy pouting to camera are juxtaposed with close-ups of Mr Pastry, entwined in his sousaphone, extending his neck in a failing attempt to press his lips to the mouthpiece of his instrument. It is a mesmerising sequence, seemingly beyond semiotic analysis. Later in the scene, Beryl haphazardly becomes caught up alongside Mr Pastry in the coiled tube of the sousaphone; Mr Pastry feigns polite embarrassment as together they try to wriggle themselves to freedom; Kate Williams is evidently corpsing as together they stumble towards the floorboards. At that moment the male gaze is subverted, and we enter a Bakhtinian world of the Carnivalesque.
Perhaps Mr Pastry's most telling interjection comes at the finale of the film. Joy has returned home to find that Johnny, her three-year-old son, is missing. She is then seen on a desperate search of boarded up streets and demolition sites to try to find the child. A sense of dread is brought about through the erratic pacing of the sequence: slow, near static passages, broken by rapid movements and jarring jump cuts - indeed camera and editing mirror the repressed terror in the heart of Joy's being. There is no music bed to soothe either the audience or Joy on this journey, and the only colour that breaks up the greyness of the sequence comes from an unattended bonfire on a demolition site. When finally, she finds the child, playing alone in the kitchen of a derelict house she embraces him and brings him to her chest; the child instinctively touches Joy's face. It is at this tender moment that the camera pans rapidly back to the bonfire, and amidst the flames the figure of Mr Pastry can just be seen dancing. As the camera lingers on the fire, his image becomes clearer: he pirouettes, stumbles, then puts his hand to his mouth in a gesture of clownish exasperation. When the camera returns to Joy her face shows a greater resilience. It is at this peculiar moment that the audience share with the central character a recognition of the fragility of our sense of certainty, and slapstick underscoring their gravest trials and tribulations. It is with this recognition, character and audience are given the possibility to live freely.
This is a form of cinema which no-one has ever seen. This is not the earnest realism of Raining Stones or I, Daniel Blake. It is a cinema in which we see both light and we see dark. It is a cinema in which we see possibility.
There is something about the grain of Eastmancolor which seeps possibility.
