The Gorbals Story

UK | 1950 | 74 minutes

Credits In Brief Director David MacKane Adapted from the phenomenally successful 1946 play staged by 's Unity Screenplay David MacKane, Robert McLeish Theatre, The Gorbals Story is still remarkable for its eschewing of the sentimental Music John Bath Scottish stereotypes of its contemporaries to become one of the first attempts at presenting a naturalistic portrait of a working-class Glasgow community. An Photography Stanley Clinton important landmark in depicitions of cinematic Scottishness, it was also one of Cast the key films in EIFF's 1982 Scotch Reels event. Willie Mutrie Howard Connell Peggie Anderson Betty Henderson Johnnie Martin Jean Mutrie Marjorie Thompson

As someone interested in Scottish Film, one of the best parts for me is the chance to see hard to see local films on the big screen. Films like Blue Black Permanent last year and the Gorbals Story this, are my first picks from the programme. It seems I’m not the only one as The Gorbals Story sold out early this year. Placing it in Filmhouse 3 was to underestimate demand and to be fair the organisers responded by programming a second showing in Filmhouse 2 tomorrow. It is based on a play by Robert McLeish for Glasgow Unity Players in 1946. They were one of several workers theatre troupes formed following the example of Joe Corrie and the Fife Miners Players. These plays of working class life proved popular and The Gorbals Story toured and even played The Garrick in London. This is where the film was spotted as material for a film by the Hyams Brothers. The movie was patchily released and didn’t receive much of an audience, and hasn’t been visible at all in recent years. It was last shown in 1982 at the International Film Festival and hasn’t been screened since. That showing created a lot of visibility for the film as it was part of a three day event of Scottish film culture at the festival, and was discussed in an essay in the influential Scotch Reels book. This led to a revival in the mid 80’s along with Corrie’s In Time Of Strife and the plays were published by 7:84 with supporting writings and photographs. Naturally the focus was on the play, with the film barely mentioned beyond a printed still. This didn’t lead to any release on VHS, DVD or online, not even a television so became impossible to see. Other industrial Scottish films like The Brave Don’t Cry and Floodtide are available, but for me The Gorbals Story and 1943’s The Shipbuilders became holy grails (can there be more than one holy grail?) So after years of longing to view it, a packed Filmhouse 3 was to be the venue. The film wasn’t a hidden gem, and I never expected it to be, and was inferior to the play. The added framing mechanism of the escaped Johnny as a painter, particularly his speech at the end was unnecessary and heavy handed. The acting and the staging are theatrical, although attempts are made to make it more cinematic. A comedy bar room brawl and a version of the Marx Brothers state room scene, both expose the low budget and their technical inferiority. The squalid conditions of the time aren’t well shown, with the voiceover explaining rather than the camera showing. The living arrangements in the tenement are never clear so the sense of space, or lack of it are shown by the number of characters interacting in the central living area. There are nice touches like Peggie throwing out the pieces to the kids (unshown) below, and the use of the word nyaff. There are also some taboo busting relationships shown like that between Magdalene and Ahmed, the Indian Pedlar or the attempted seduction of Peggie by the much younger Johnny using pity. The fact the Indian was played by Lothar Lewinsohn shows the different mores of the time, although interestingly the racist and sectarian language of the play has been cut. Another great joy is seeing many recognizable Scottish acting talent like Roddy McMillan, Andrew Kier and Betty Henderson in debut or early performances. Stalwarts of the Glasgow Unity Theatre stage production like Russell Hunter would go on to much success later, but are far from convincing here. The film has meaning beyond its merits as part of the representation of Scottish cinema, which it is why it is more discussed than seen. The workers nature of the film (although work is barely mentioned), and the urban centre place it in opposition to the contemporary kailyard based and tartan draped films like Happy Go Lovely, Laxdale Hall, Rob Roy: The Highland Rogue and Bonnie Prince Charlie. This

Scotland on Screen is a debate for a longer essay, and the likes of The Silver Darlings, Floodtide and The Brothers mean it is more complex than oftten supposed. http://ozufan.wordpress.com/tag/tartanry/

What made the Gorbals famous? Drunks, poverty, razor- gangs? The answer is none of these. The answer is a novel: Jeff Torrington belongs to a long tradition. Cal McCrystal unravels the tragic story of another novelist, who first gave the Glasgow slum its notoriety CAL MCCRYSTAL Sunday 31 January 1993 IT SEEMS that the Gorbals, like the poor, is always with us. Last week, when Jeff Torrington won the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize for his first novel Swing Hammer Swing], this curious Glasgow place-name was back in the national media once again. Torrington, who is 57, grew up in the Gorbals and his book is set there, 25 years ago. And so he has become 'the Gorbals novelist', with all the implications of head-lice and gang-warfare running riot in what was once Britain's most notorious slum. We live in an age marked by the violence and poverty of places such as Toxteth and Moss Side, when the Gorbals as it was has long since vanished; and yet the Gorbals remains notorious. Why? The answer lies in the neglected story of a working-class bachelor who, many years before Torrington put pen to paper, wanted to describe the experience of living in a slum. The Gorbals did not start out poor. The district lies just south of the Clyde, within walking distance of Glasgow city centre north of the river, and was laid out at the end of the 18th century by (among others) James Laurie, a wealthy merchant keen to establish an elegant residential neighbourhood on what once had been the site of a leper colony. By the mid-19th century, the Gorbals (the name is thought to derive from the Gaelic gort an bhaile - the town's field) was thoroughly middle-class. But its elegance faded when Irish, Highland and European migrants crowded into the city. Big houses were subdivided and landlords grew negligent. By the Twenties, it was a full-blown slum, but no worse than many others in Glasgow. Then an alcoholic Gorbals baker, with a Highland brogue and a paunch, sat down to write a book. Alexander McArthur lived on Waddell Street, close to the city's Southern Necropolis and closer still to the Stag public house, from which he was often seen staggering home. But at night he worked for hours at a typewriter. In 1934, he sent two manuscripts off to Longman's, the publishers. Longman's was impressed with neither plot nor writing, but was so astonished by McArthur's revelations about razor gangs, winos, poverty, overcrowding, sickness, defective drains, bedbugs and three-shilling prostitutes that the firm asked H Kingsley Long, one of its professional readers, to take a look at the manuscripts. Kingsley Long, a journalist on The People went to Glasgow, and collaborated with McArthur to write No Mean City, a searing novel whose chief character is Johnnie Stark, son of a violent father and downtrodden mother, who becomes unchallenged 'Razor King' of a Gorbals gang. Long, who earlier had ghosted a book on New York street gangs, chose the novel's title from the Bible ('I am . . . a Jew of Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city' - Paul, Acts 21, 39) and was credited with so much of the book's success that the royalties were split 3-1 in his favour. No Mean City enraged Glasgow. It contained, for its time, remarkably raw descriptions of sex and violence. No local bookshop would sell it and libraries were forbidden to stock it. The Glasgow Herald refused to review it. But it created a huge stir beyond the city. The Times Literary Supplement called it 'a story of appalling savagery' with 'tramplings, poundings, kicking unconscious, but great physical courage and spiritual endurance.' The first edition ran to 16,000 copies before the Second World War interrupted the run. Its popularity still endures. Corgi Books has reprinted it almost every year since it acquired the paperback rights in 1957. Its total sales are estimated at about 750,000. The success encouraged McArthur to write more. The son of a Highland father and a mother from the Isle of Islay, he observed life in the Gorbals without feeling that he spiritually belonged to the slum. But without Long, he could not repeat the success of No Mean

Scotland on Screen City. Piles of manuscripts accumulated in Waddell Street and in the office of a local publisher, William MacLellan (one of them ran to 350,000 words). He submitted short stories to the Scottish newspapers, which turned them down. Frustrated, McArthur blew nearly all his royalty cheques on drink. The year 1947 was particularly trying. His widowed mother died in March. He also had a running battle with a Scottish playwright, Robert McLeish, whom he accused of plagiarising a play, The Mystery of Gorbals Terrace, which McArthur had sent to the Unity Theatre. McLeish's play, The Gorbals Story, was a great success, enjoying two London seasons. Although McLeish and the theatre denied plagiarism, McArthur was obsessed by the dispute. On 4 September, the Gorbals author cashed his latest royalties cheque and invited some acquaintances to a binge at a restuarant in the city centre. After much drinking, McArthur excused himself, walked to the Clyde, drank a bottle of Lysol (concentrated disinfectant) and threw himself from Rutherglen Bridge. It was not a clean suicide. He crawled from the river and was found unconscious on the footpath. When he died soon afterwards in hospital, a ration book and 1s 3d were found in his pockets. Only two people went to his funeral, both reporters. But what McArthur - and Long - had created lived on. The Gorbals was woven richly into literature. Other local residents tried their hand: Gorbals Doctor by Dr George Gladstone Robertson; Spring Remembered, a Scottish Jewish Childhood, by Evelyn Cowan; three volumes of autobiography by Ralph Glasser, a Gorbals psychologist and economist; books of Gorbals photography. Even a ballet, Miracle in the Gorbals, was staged by the Royal Ballet, then known as Sadler's Wells. And in 1969, another McArthur novel appeared posthumously, depicting life in a Gorbals brothel and rewritten by Peter Watts, an author of Westerns. By then the Gorbals had undergone yet another metamorphosis. Glasgow Corporation ordered slum clearance and redevelopment in the Sixties. Sir Basil Spence designed 24-storey black-and-grey towers for some of the population. Others were rehoused in equally dreary new estates on the city periphery. Today the metamorphosis continues. The ugly Spence towers are being knocked down, to be replaced by low-rise housing. Little remains of McArthur's Gorbals - apart from the Citizen's Theatre, which rejected one of his plays. Waiting for a taxi on a Gorbals street last week, it was hard to spot the ingredients that gave the place its literary fame. But it is also hard to believe that Torrington's Swing Hammer Swing will be the last of the Gorbals genre. In this novel about the Sixties, the indigent hero is asked: 'Who'd want a typewriter aroon these parts?' The question might be: who wouldn't?

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