Black Jack

Released 1979, directed by Ken Loach

Black Jack is nominally a children’s film, and is based on a children’s book by Leon Garfield; both are British, and the film at least shares in that British tradition of children’s fiction which emphasizes the clash between childhood idealism and the emerging contours of reality, heightening and acidulating the resulting disillusionment into a surreal misanthropy. But it is also a relatively gentle example of the tradition, an English summer film, set in an 18th century Ruritania that is still slightly fey, cushioned by abundant green grass. While bad things do happen, the central characters are never left bereft of authorial protection; a somewhat happy ending isn’t in doubt.

The film’s largest gesture towards wish fulfilment is the quiet adaptability of its protagonist Tolly (Stephen Hirst), a draper’s apprentice in perhaps his early teens, an orphan, who is kidnapped in the early goings but who never seems at a loss, emotionally or economically. His kidnapper is one Black Jack (Jean Franval), a hulking French murderer who has saved himself from the gallows through the trick of swallowing a bent spoon (apparently the idea is to curve the spoon so that, when halfway swallowed, it keeps one’s windpipe from being crushed by the hanging noose – I’m not sure if this is a real thing, and Google is resolutely unhelpful on the topic). Jack has poor English and a severe post-gallows rasp, and plans for Tolly to be his spokesman. They wander about the countryside, with Jack intent on robbery, by means if necessary of further murder. These early scenes establish the sophistication the film means bring to its examination of child/adult relationships, as well as its intention to, throughout, take the child’s point of view. Jack is in this respect a stand-in for adult authority: he is mercurial, authoritarian, dangerous and violent (we might protest that adult authority is only violent in exceptional, immoral circumstances, but again this is the child’s view, in which the tools that even caring adults use to enforce obedience – threats, sternness, confinements – are certainly on the continuum of violence); even his exaggerated size is a nod to the magnifying powers of smallness. Yet Jack is also far from omnipotent. He isn’t observant, and can be tricked; more importantly he is prey to all of the adult troubles that Tolly glides over – we see him depressed, we see him unable to earn a living, we see him unable to fit in with society. This mixed portrait of adulthood, whose turning facets make it unknowable from the child’s perspective, carries over to the other adults portrayed; some are cruel and some are kind, but none are consistent, and all carry the danger of whimsically imposing outsized consequences.

In their wandering Tolly and Black Jack join up with an escaped mental patient, Belle (Louise Cooper), a young girl who has been packed off to the madhouse by her family. With Belle’s introduction the film picks up structural complexity – there are side plots involving Belle’s parents, the doctors at the institution, a traveling patent medicine salesman (the folk musician Packie Byrne, in a performance of excellent addled slyness), and then in particular the salesman’s erstwhile assistant Hatch (Andrew Bennett), a boy Tolly’s age who with a twitch of narrative vigor breaks from his bit part and becomes the film’s villain, a scheming blackmailer whose navigation of the adult world is in its forceful deceptions a mirror to Tolly’s game placidity.

This is all a lot to hang on a movie whose pace is so dreamy and rambling, and it’s understandable that Loach was dissatisfied with how it came out, going so far as to cut a shorter version for the DVD release; yet I’d argue that all of the to-and-fro’ing and threads picked up and worried a bit and then set down, give the story a worked, frayed, yarnish feeling, a mellowness that fits the production’s overall tone better than anything sharper might. The cinematography, by Chris Menges (who also shot Black Beauty), is painterly in the mode of Barry Lyndon, although the camera work is for the most part not nearly so severe. Like that film candlelight is prominent in the interior scenes, the candles notably unaesthetic, fat tallowy pillars that give off black smoke and whose flames cant menacingly. The cast is largely unprofessional. The film was done on the run (due to financial issues), with shooting only lasting six weeks, and there’s reason to suspect that line readings were an issue – most of the dialogue has elements of hesitation and verbal clumsiness, and there is an Altmanesque naturalness to it, of missed meanings and cross-talk. The sound quality is gently obscure; compounding this is the fact that the cast use their native Yorkshire dialect, which at times cleaves to a recognizable modern English and at times does not (at times it sounds almost Gallic), meaning that an American like myself needs subtitles.

This haziness, intentional and not, is good backing for the film’s stranger bits, that is those bits most alienated from a professionalized (adult) fiction. Some of these are solecisms, such as the film forgetting to convert currency amounts to 1750 pounds (meaning that the characters transact in absurdly large amounts); some are elisions over mature matters that a more mature film would be more careful with. The most meaningful are hints of magic, that gesture away from historicity and towards a more fairytale mode – for example, Belle’s madness, which is of the poetic, visionary variety. These strange notes are the crucial notes that give the film its long-summer-evening, half-realized quality, its sense of displacement which intrudes into adulthood the child-sense of mystery.

For ballast however there is the relationship between Belle and Tolly, child to child, which gradually displaces the various fraught child/adult relationships which have preceded it. The bond between the two is treated seriously – eventually they pledge to marry, and this is absolutely given the weight it deserves, both by the film and by the characters. Belle, coming to fear that her madness is permanent, and not wanting to make Tolly sacrifice, commits herself to the madhouse she had once fled; Tolly, sacrificing anyway, follows her and installs himself nearby as a tavern boy, coming to the madhouse gates each day to see her, only to be turned away (due, for complex reasons, to the machinations of the callous Hatch). Eventually Black Jack intervenes, resolving the situation not with any adult sophistication, but rather with just-as-adult violence, breaking down the door and tilting the film into its one truly horrific sequence, a sprint through the dank Boschian madhouse interior. Belle rescued, she and Tolly go to join his seafaring uncle, and the film’s last shot finds them aboard a ship as it pulls out of harbor, dissolving into fog – a freeing and melancholy image, that makes us feel the breadth of their future, and all of the good and bad that might happen to them. Black Jack himself, touched but not particularly redeemed, is left onshore.

NOTES

In the book version Black Jack is British. He was made a Frenchman for the film because it was thought that doing so might attract a French audience. That did not happen at all, and Black Jack joins Vampyr as a film formed at least partially by naïve commercialism.

The character of Hatch deserves more discussion. It is true that we see him doing mostly wrong, up to and including murder, but we do not ever forget his age and vulnerability. He functions by out-brazening the foolish adults in his orbit, and his success gives him an air of invulnerability that lessens somewhat the tension we feel at his risky maneuvers. Then, in the madhouse scene, he is abruptly killed – offscreen, but horribly. There is something deeply sad about this – an injection of harsh realism, and a reminder of how immortal children can seem, right up to the moment they are harmed. It’s so jolting that I would guess that it was an emotional beat that got away from Loach somewhat; if so it’s another example of how Black Jack’s wavering sense of technical and artistic control make it stronger.