 Alan Clarke was born in Birkenhead,
Cheshire, on 28 October 1935, the son of an insurance salesman. He
directed only three films specifically for cinematic release, the bulk
of his prolific output being made for television. A radical,
uncompromising and innovative director, his best work concerned the
exposure of injustice towards the most despised and neglected groups in
society.
After leaving grammar school and completing National Service, he
turned his back on a steady job as an insurance clerk, and emigrated to
Canada, working as a gold miner before enrolling in a course in Radio
and Television Arts in Toronto between 1958-1961. He returned to
England after graduating to work in television, moving to the BBC in 1969, where he began to develop his
directorial style in The Wednesday Play and Play for
Today.
Clarke's three best-regarded works dealt
with the violence of young males. He achieved notoriety with
Scum (1977), a brutal exposé of conditions in Borstal
starring Phil Daniels and Ray Winstone. A timorous BBC banned the film before it could be shown, but
it was remade as a feature, released in 1979. Made
in Britain (ITV, tx. 10/7/1983), scripted by David Leland, starred Tim
Roth as Trevor, an incandescently violent, racist skinhead. For
the first time Clarke used the
Steadicam to shoot the characters in long, continuous takes
to give the impression of ceaseless motion and neurotic energy, a
technique he used extensively in later films. The final film of this
'trilogy', The Firm (1988) starred Gary Oldman as 'Bex' Bissell, a wisecracking
estate agent, addicted to football violence. Clarke's nihilism emerges powerfully in these
films; no solution is offered to the problems of their protagonists,
and their violence is not explained by social deprivation, but is
atavistic, given its opportunity by a Thatcherite morality which emphasised
individuality at the expense of society.
Clarke's 1980s films made for the cinema
are very different. Billy The Kid and The Green Baize
Vampire (1985) was a Brechtian
musical about snooker which, though it contains some lively songs, was
conceptually flawed and a failure at the box office. Rita, Sue
and Bob Too (1986) was more successful, demonstrating Clarke's talent for comedy. A raunchy tale about a
ménage a trois between two working-class teenagers and a married
middle-aged man, set around a run-down Bradford council estate, its
humour does not dilute the bleakness of the girls' lives.
Before Clarke's premature death from
cancer on 24 July 1990 in London he was experimenting with a minimalist
style. Elephant (1988) is the most extreme example, a
16mm colour film of eighteen killings in Northern Ireland.
Critical appreciation of his work remains muted, considering him
unjustly to be an ultra-realist, lacking in art and artifice.
Bibliography
Kelly, Richard (ed), Alan Clarke (London: Faber and Faber,
1998)
Thomson, David, 'Walkers in the World: Alan Clarke' in Film
Comment, May-June 1993, pp. 78-83
'Director Alan Clarke', BBC 2 (Corin Campbell-Hill), tx. 12/7/1991
Andrew Spicer, Reference Guide to British and Irish
Film Directors
|
FILM & TV CREDITS
