Basil Dearden, recently celebrated with an Eclipse box set of his London crime dramas, was almost unique in the early part of his career (the forties and fifties) for trying to look at working-class life in Britain and examine the issues affecting it. Unlike the later "kitchen sink" realist films of the sixties, mainly adapted from plays and novels, Dearden tended to work from original screenplays, and he tended to use genre to sweeten the pill of social commentary.
Violent Playground (1958) is one of his best, and it shows both the strengths and weaknesses of Dearden's approach in great detail. One of the director's quirks, picked up at Ealing, was a fondness for films which interwove multiple storylines (Train of Events, Pool of London), rather like John Sayles, allowing a panoply of a particular time and place to emerge, but sadly limiting the development of each storyline. Fortunately, in Violent Playground,...
Violent Playground (1958) is one of his best, and it shows both the strengths and weaknesses of Dearden's approach in great detail. One of the director's quirks, picked up at Ealing, was a fondness for films which interwove multiple storylines (Train of Events, Pool of London), rather like John Sayles, allowing a panoply of a particular time and place to emerge, but sadly limiting the development of each storyline. Fortunately, in Violent Playground,...
- 8/2/2012
- MUBI
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