Up the Junction | Peter Collinson | 1968

[ReviewAZON asin="B001MUJFGC" display="inlinepost"]This is an overlooked British gem – a forgotten piece of swinging sixties London, which has recently been released on DVD.

Unlike nearly its entire peer group works, (The L-Shaped Room, Room at The Top, Darling, Look Back in Anger), ‘Up the Junction’ is in colour. This takes nothing away from its sense of period or from the heavyweight social drama it conveys. It covers a lot of the territory of the others, but for some inexplicable reason fails to carry the same kind of reputation. It is adapted from a novel by Nell Dunn.

One amusing aspect of this works is the now outdated social distinction between those who live in Chelsea and those unfortunate enough to live in Battersea – the story, is essentially a ‘fish out of water’ plot following the upper-class heroine ‘Polly’ (played by Suzy Kendal), venturing ‘sarf of the river’ to poor, nasty working class Battersea. Battersea is considered rich now of course; developers have seen to it that there is not an echelon of London that is a traditional working class area, but this is part of the appeal of the film. You will only find characters and plotlines like this in ‘EastEnders’, that paragon of miserable soap operas. Here it is all done better and with a more entrenched sense of the inescapable and tragic.

The film opens with Polly being taken across Battersea Bridge in a Rolls Royce. The music is very light and cheery throughout – in spite of some of the subject matter (poverty/abortion/chauvinism/domestic violence/) and provided by Manfred Mann.

Polly lands in Battersea and immediately lands herself a job in as a packer in a chocolate factory. Her workmates are a stellar cast of regular English (and especially, London) players. Susan George (Straw Dogs) is one of her fellow line workers. Maureen Lipman (actress and wife of writer Jack Rosenthal), who plays Sylvia – a woman Polly will grow close to alongside Rube (played by Adrienne Posta). Mrs Hardy is played by Queenie Watts – a London staple, who supposedly would sing regularly in The Blind Beggar – the pub where Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell.

Sylvia and Rube look like they are Amy Winehouse and Lulu impersonators, especially when they do a turn at the local boozer. The eye make-up is thick and heavy, the skirts short, the earrings large – chandelier large. The women from an older generation look like remnants from the war: big bloomers/overalls and curlers in their hair/fags in their mouths. In truth though, the lives of these women is appalling. During the evening at the local boozer, Polly hears one of the factory women relate the news of the death of one of their neighbours – a woman that would do the washing of others for a living, to the rest of the drinking group; ‘she’s been a scrubber all her life that one – since she was fourteen.’ ‘I’m surprised it didn’t finish her off sooner.’ ‘When I go – I’m goin’ in an ‘orse n’ cart, you get to your grave too quick in one of them motors.’ For those not familiar with traditional London working class mores – going through the streets in a horse driven cart was the epitome of ‘a good send off.’ But this is the entire beauty of this movie. It is an exercise in nostalgia all the way through, for its style and in the now thankfully decaying attitudes of the people whose lives it portrays.

Polly finds herself a flat, a seedy bedsit. The initial meeting with the letting agent sees him on the phone with a black family in front of him, convincing the person on the other end of the phone ‘that blacks don’t smell – only Pakistanis smell, or their cooking does.’ He is happy to accommodate Polly – her cut glass voice is a dead giveaway for those who meet her….’she’s all posh isn’t she?’ The letting agent amusingly sees her presence in this awful dilapidated bed sit as an indication of a shifting tide: ‘Ah…Chelsea – a different world entirely.’ ‘Can you see Battersea becoming an ‘up’ area as we say in the property world???’ Hilarious. (If only he could time travel to now. Polly’s flat would be worth at least £250.000, even in a recession).

She fills it with moth eaten furniture bought from a second hand dealer (played by Alfie Bass – another cockney staple). Peter (a very young Dennis Waterman) helps to get her stuff home and asks her for a date. Polly and Peter have diametrically opposing views of the virtues of working class life. Polly sees it as honest, vibrant and void of hypocrisy. Polly is evidently happy in Battersea and sees none of its flaws. Footage of her swinging her back as she is walking around generally taking in the new environment show her seeing he characters in a totally different light to anyone else. Her furniture is looked down on by Rube and Sylvia when they come to look at the place. Polly is alone in seeing the virtues of the life she is leading. Even the story of a dodgy fraud carried out by Sylvia to get away with paying for her three piece suite is found charming by Polly.

Peter has not overtly taken Polly on as an act of opportunism, or at least, that is not implied in the movie – he sees her as a redeeming feature of an area he is sick of. During one date when they just go for a walk, Polly asks him what he sees when he looks over the bridge at the landscape of where they both live. He sees a nasty existence ‘with two weeks in Ramsgate every year and a box at the end of it.’ ‘You’re the only beautiful thing around here Princess.’Just how ugly the life in Battersea is becomes evident when Polly gets further involved in the lives of Rube and Sylvia. Sylvia and Polly cover the fact that Rube is pregnant when she suddenly faints at work. The subsequent dramas are almost painful to watch: the seedy abortionist in Wimbledon (played by the eternally wonderful Hilda Baker), the arguments in the street between Terry, Rubes boyfriend and Rube’s mother. And subsequent scenes between Sylvia and her husband are nasty and brutish – even for 1968. Even a trip to the seaside ends in misery and disaster for Peter and Polly

Every bit as good a bit of social snapshot as Alfie – but without the realisation. By the end of Alfie we know that the main lead has learned and matured. This is a good drama, but we need to see more of the world that Polly comes from to truly understand her reasoning. Rather like Grace in Dogville, she is trying to idealistically see the good in people who do not deserve it. The observer therefore is always on Peter’s side. With some considerable justification. It is a pleasure though to watch a London that has all but disappeared. The physical landscape has changed dramatically with only Battersea Bridge evident of the world Polly is trying to inherit. The social landscape, with the splintering of the working class 20 years later has made this a unique nostalgia item.

Gail Spencer