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Ken Loach: friend or foe?

Cillian Murphy and Padraic Delaney in The Wind That Shakes the Barley
  • Posted at 4:17pm
  • 06 November 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT
  • 1 comment

Hollywood's response to the Vietnam War didn't really come until after the evacuation of American troops in 1975.

The unflinchingly critical Coming Home and The Deer Hunter were released three years later, opening the floodgates to other similarly themed movies.

A more recent equivalent for us is the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But film-makers did not wait for the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to address it.

By then we'd already seen a host of films: Cal; Angel; The Crying Game; In the Name of the Father; Some Mother's Son; Michael Collins; even The General (Tuesday 11 November, Sky Movies Modern Greats), directed by Englishman John Boorman.

As such, we're used to seeing portrayals of war-torn Belfast, divided communities, kneecappings, army brutality and government intransigence.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Thursday 13 November, Film4), a 1920s-set historical drama by Ken Loach, came out in 2006.

A Palme d'Or winner at Cannes, it offered a sympathetic view of Irish republican rebels countering appalling violence by British mercenaries the Black and Tans.

You might imagine that a story set over 80 years ago would be considered a "safe" period piece. Instead it caused a flurry of outrage.

The Sun's Harry MacAdam called it "the most pro-IRA film ever", Tim Luckhurst in The Times saw it as "poisonously anti-British", and Simon Heffer in The Telegraph accused Loach of hating this country while "leeching off it", admitting, "I haven't seen it, any more than I need to read Mein Kampf to know what a louse Hitler was."

Strong stuff. Loach dismissed these accusations as "nonsense", claiming to have simply addressed Britain's imperialist past. For me, politics aside, it was refreshing to see something less gung-ho.

Creating controversy now is Hunger (in cinemas from Friday 31 October), which focuses on IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.

Directed by Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen, it will undoubtedly annoy the same media detractors with its sadistic prison staff and martyr-like protagonist. It is, however, a stunning piece of cinema and demands to be seen.

A film touching on complex issues cannot possibly keep everybody happy. Even-handedness is more likely to lead to bland narrative.

As long as I'm not being lectured at – and neither Loach nor McQueen does that – I'll make up my own mind.

If film-makers are prepared to credit us with intelligence, we should use it.

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  • Posted on 07 June 2009
  • at 8:28pm
  • by paddyspanishman

I don't see how the film is 'a sympathetic view of Irish republican rebels', from my point of view it seems to be a fairly accurate portrayal of the of the terrorism of the British Forces and the counter-terrorism of the native population, and of course the human effect of the civil war that followed. As far as its detractors go would you call Schindler's List an anti-German film or Gandhi an anti-British one? Hardly

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