Light in the Dark

That's James Mason, that is, in a Gainsborough melodrama, and pretty well everyone's a nasty piece of work. He's the notorious rake Lord Rohan, who requires an heir from Clarissa (Phyllis Calvert) whilst he gets on with having fun, and who is distracted by Clarissa's old school friend (friend is perhaps overstating it), Hester (Margaret Lockwood). Whilst Hester and Rohan gets designs on each other, Clarissa falls in love with Hester's old beau of convenience, Barbary (Stewart Granger), who has a nice line in Othellos and highway men. Rather than sitting down and sorting it all out, Hester has to ruin things for everyone, and it gets pretty nasty for everyone.

Every one gets punished in the end, and no one's pleasant, with the only problem in the end being that not everyone is punished enough - although death is pretty final. And there's a rather superfluous present day framing device of contemporary descendents of Barbary and Clarissa, who presumably get to live happily ever after. Some fascinatingly strong woman, but the film is a tad let down buy some dodgy racial stuff.

I watched this on the recommendation of a friend - well to be accurate the mother of a friend, or pedantic the mother in law of a friend - who has kept asking me if I've watched a film called The Kid yet. Now I have - I could have been put off it by the director being Nick Moran, from that mockney masterpiece Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but that would have been a shame.

It's an adaptation of a true story, told in two books by Kevin Lewis, who grew up in an abusive and neglectful family, escaped into a bar and boxing, and finally made it after he found someone to believe when he hit rock bottom. On paper it really shouldn't work - it is grim stuff to be heart warming, and daily headlines tell us about the ones who did make it. And the climax is botched.

The film begins with the young adult Lewis dumped on the street outside the house where he used to live, and him breaking in to his old bedroom, and making an attempt at suicide. Of course, as he's narrating we have a fair idea how this will turn out, but first we get young Kevin and then we get teen Kevin and finally back to adult Kevin. The early scenes are genuinely harrowing - not so much the alcoholic, neglectful father (Con O'Neill), but the violent and remarkably uglified mother, Gloria (Natascha McElhone, unrecognisable from The Truman Show), and apparently the abuse is toned down from the real story. There are saviours - a diligent teacher (Ioan Gruffudd), a smart fosterer (Bernard Hill) and a kindly couple (James Fox and Shirley Anne Field), but bad luck and poor choices dog Kevin. It could have ended a lot worse.

Moran gets pretty convincing performances out of his inexperienced cast members, although you miss the star cameos once their roles are over. There are some good flourishes to show the passage of time, but it suffers from what I call the tin bath syndrome - you interrupt your viewing of a harrowing scene to be nostalgic about that tin bath, just like one you used to have... Well, in this case it's Rubick's Cube and other ephemera of the 1980s and so forth, the fetish for period details sometimes too likely to shock you out of the film.

But it works as a post-Loach film, and its heart's in the right place, even if it is perhaps a little too in love with bare knuckle boxing in junk yards.