Kes DVD [1969]

Product Information

The BFI 100: 1-10". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 29 February 2000 . Retrieved 1 February 2023. Karlovy Vary IFF: July 15 – 26, 1970 – Awards". Karloff Vary International Film Festival. Archived from the original on 6 February 2009 . Retrieved 1 June 2008. David's role as Billy Casper was hit break-out one. At just 14, he was thrown into the spotlight but walked away with a BAFTA for his performance. Kent, Philip (2016). "Championing the underdog - Ken Loach before and after Kes". Essay included with the 2016 Blu-Ray release of Kes, Eureka Entertainment Ltd. (Masters of Cinema Series #151).

Kes : David Bradley, Freddie Fletcher, Lynne Perrie, Colin Kes : David Bradley, Freddie Fletcher, Lynne Perrie, Colin

Andrew Garfield: Playing Billy Casper. In Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 2004 (Behind the Scenes with Kes)". Royal Exchange Theatre. [ permanent dead link]Playing a wayward son in Queenie's Castle from 1970-72, he also appeared in Yorkshire's beloved Emmerdale. Not the only Liverpudlian in the cast, Colin played Mr Farthing and for his role, earned himself a BAFTA.

Kes DVD - Zavvi UK Kes DVD - Zavvi UK

He later won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for 1981's Chariots of Fire and later wrote the screenplay for 1994's War of the Buttons. It [the film] has gradually achieved classic status and remains the most clear-sighted film ever made about the compromised expectations of the British working class. Its world has changed: Billy's all-white "secondary modern" school (for children who failed the national exam for eleven-year-olds) would have become a fully streamed (academically nonselective) "comprehensive" in the early seventies, and increasingly multiethnic; Barnsley's coal mines closed in the early nineties. But the film's message is relevant wherever the young are maltreated and manipulated, and wherever the labor force is exploited. [18] British Films at Doc Films, 2011-2012". The Nicholson Center for British Studies. University of Chicago. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Set in and around Barnsley, the film was one of the first of several collaborations between Ken Loach and Barry Hines that used authentic Yorkshire dialect. The extras were all hired from in and around Barnsley. The DVD version of the film has certain scenes dubbed over with fewer dialect terms than in the original. In a 2013 interview, director Ken Loach said that, upon its release, United Artists organised a screening of the film for some American executives and they said that they could understand Hungarian better than the dialect in the film. [6]The certificate given to the film has occasionally been reviewed by the British Board of Film Classification, as there is a small amount of swearing, including more than one instance of the word twat. It was originally classified by the then British Board of Film Censors as U for Universal (suitable for children), at a time when the only other certificates were A (more suitable for adult audiences) and X (for showing when no person under 16 years was present... raised to 18 years in July, 1970). Three years later, Stephen Murphy, the BBFC Secretary, wrote in a letter that it would have been given the new Advisory certificate under the system then in place. [11] Murphy also argued that the word "bugger" is a term of affection and not considered offensive in the area that the film was set. In 1987, the VHS release was given a PG certificate on the grounds of "the frequent use of mild language", and the film has remained PG since that time. [12] Home media [ edit ] Correspondence from Stephen Murphy on the certification of Kes" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 September 2015 . Retrieved 23 August 2014. The production company was set up with the name "Kestrel Films". Ken Loach and Tony Garnett used this for some of their later collaborations such as Family Life and The Save the Children Fund Film. Ken Loach's Kes was dubbed one of the top 10 British films by the British Film Institute - and is one of Yorkshire's most successful exports. He became a soap star, joining Brookside to play Harry Cross for seven years from 1983-1990, and reprised the role in 1999.

Kes (film) - Wikipedia

Freddie retired as an actor in 1996, after playing another 'Judd' - this time a pub landlord in the film When Saturday Comes - after being recommended for the role by the film's star, Sean Bean! Her final episode was March 1994 - although she did briefly as a ghost in 1996, with residents claiming to have seen her spirit around the street. One day, Billy takes a kestrel from a nest on a farm. His interest in learning falconry prompts him to steal a book on the subject from a secondhand book shop, as he is underage and needs – but lies about the reasons he cannot obtain – adult authorisation for a borrower's card from the public library. As the relationship between Billy and "Kes", the kestrel, improves during the training, so does Billy's outlook and horizons. For the first time in the film, Billy receives praise, from his English teacher after delivering an impromptu talk about training Kes. Disney+ is here in the UK and if paid for an annual subscription can save viewers 15%, giving you access to Disney and Pixar films, and popular series such as The Mandalorian. New O2 customers, or existing customers who are upgrading their plan, can get up to 6 free months of Disney+. The film has been much praised, especially for the performance of the teenage David Bradley, who had never acted before, in the lead role, and for Loach's compassionate treatment of his working-class subject; it remains a biting indictment of the British education system of the time as well as of the limited career options then available to lower-class, unskilled workers in regional Britain. It was ranked seventh in the British Film Institute's Top Ten (British) Films. [3] This was Loach's second feature film for cinema release.For some of the cast, the film was a springboard into successful TV and film careers, soap stardom and more. But his film career wasn't over: he appeared in All Quiet on the Western Front and 1978's Absolution. Much of the film's content has been discussed as a critique of the British education system of the time, known as the Tripartite System, which sorted children into different types of schools depending on their academic ability. The view of the creators is that such a system was harmful both to the children involved and to wider society. In his 2006 book, Life After Kes, Simon Golding commented that "Billy Casper, unlike the author [Golding], was a victim of the 11-plus, a government directive that turned out, for those who passed the exam, prospective white-collar workers, fresh from grammar schools, into jobs that were safe and well paid. The failures, housed in secondary modern schools, could only look forward to unskilled manual labour or the dangers of the coal face. Kes protests at this educational void that does not take into account individual skills, and suggests this is a consequence of capitalist society, which demands a steady supply of unskilled labour." [8] Golding also quoted director Ken Loach who stated that, "It [the film] should be dedicated to all the lads who had failed their 11-plus. There's a colossal waste of people and talent, often through schools where full potential is not brought out." [8] Graeme Ross, writing in 2019 in The Independent, placed the film 8th in his "best British movies of all time", saying:

Kes (1969) - IMDb Kes (1969) - IMDb

An outstanding performance from David Bradley as Billy glues together the sometimes shaky portrayals of the other characters. As a contemporary social commentary this is a film that has many of the elements you might expect. Billy has an impoverished family with an elder brother working down the pit and a single mother struggling to cope with the situation in which she finds herself. His school is staffed by teachers who react to their part in a failing system with aggression towards the pupils. And he's quite at home with petty crime, stealing a pint from the milkman and a volume to help him train the kestrel from the second hand bookshop. But the film is saved from cliché by the honesty of the acting and the quality of the direction; it seems at times as if we're watching a fly on the wall documentary. The reactions of the boys to the rant and the caning they receive for being caught smoking is entirely natural. Brian Glover as the sadistic games master is all too credible. And the employment interview is too close to my own experience to be fiction. Kes is an extraordinary film, beautifully composed and searing in its realist humanity. It is often compared with François Truffaut's Les 400 coups (1959), another memorable depiction of adolescent rebellion in an unsympathetic adult world. Both films are what the French term a cri de coeur, a heartfelt appeal for adults not to write off the next generation and condemn them to a future without meaning, but rather to take the time and the effort to instil in youngsters a sense of self-worth and desire to make something of their lives. Forty years since it was first seen, Kes has lost none of its power to move an audience and remains one of the most inspired and inspirational films of the Twentieth Century. [19]A lad from the West Riding of Yorkshire, he once said the only acting he'd ever done was in the headmaster's office. a b Walker, Alexander (1974). Hollywood UK: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (1sted.). Stein And Day. p.378. ISBN 978-0812815498. Funny, sad, and bitingly authentic, Kes resonates with Loach's anger at the way so many kids grow up into narrow, option-free lives. ... But Loach's underdogs are never sad passive victims. There's a defiant spirit about Billy, and a fierce joy in the scenes where he trains his kestrel. Kes, as Loach has commented, sets up a contrast between "the bird that flies free and the boy who is trapped", but at the same time there's an unmistakable identification between them. ... The film's ending is desolate, but we sense Billy will survive. [17] A harrowing coming of age story, the 1969 film followed the struggles of Billy, a South Yorkshire lad who escaped the pressures of his home life by training a fledgeling kestrel. Based on the novel A Kestrel for a Knave, author Barry Hines helped adapt it for the big screen. The Sheffield native went on to join the comedy classic Porridge playing the slightly slow Cyril Heslop.