East End Film Festival preview

Totally kosher? Or a load of old J Arthur Rank? Time Out looks at how the East End has been portrayed on film, from Hitchcock and Jack the Ripper to Guy Ritchie

With some notable exceptions, the East End has been poorly served by film. (Arguably, a better case can be made for television – where series like ‘The Rag Trade’, ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ or ‘EastEnders’ have more lightly caught its special mix of toughness, vitality, earthiness and humour.)

Early footage is depressingly rare, but the rivetting five-minute film ‘The Great East End Anarchists Battle’, one of four documentaries made of the 1911 Sidney Street Siege has survived. Fascinating as it is, its shadowy images of street conflict could have done little to refute the area’s unenviable, centuries-old reputation as a dark, mysterious and dangerous place, a breeding ground of immorality, racial miscegenation, criminality and murder.

Those themes ran like polluted water through silent films. In 1919, DW Griffith created a foggy Limehouse in Hollywood for his melodrama, ‘Broken Blossoms’. In 1926, Hitchcock darkened his depiction of Victorian Whitechapel with menacing shadows in his extraordinary Jack the Ripper thriller, ‘The Lodger’.

At the birth of cinema, the East End was the most densely populated area of the largest city in the world. I’ve never caught the anonymous ‘Hoxton… Saturday July 3rd Britannia Theatre’ of 1920, but the still in Colin Sorensen’s book ‘London on Film’ of the crowds in Pitfield Street is a reminder of the bustling activity– the street theatre – that once typified the East End’s main thoroughfares. The dismal state of the houses that many in those chipper crowds lived in is made clear in Elton and Anstey’s powerful 1935 documentary ‘Housing Problems’.

The Second World War brought the apotheosis of the East End – and some sense of that intangible Blitz spirit comes across in such fine wartime propaganda films as Humphrey Jenning’s ‘London Can Take It’. But the greatest and bleakest of depictions – and my favourite – came after the war with Robert Hamer’s 1947 film, ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’, an unromanticised view of a Bethnal Green housewife who shields an old flame, an armed robber escaped from jail.

That’s not to forget the two finest post-war docklands films. Still worth watching are two contrasting crime thrillers, ‘Pool of London’, made in 1951 by the socially acute Basil Dearden when there was still some docks to film in and featuring some fine location work; and John Mackenzie’s ‘The Long Good Friday’ in 1980 – by which time, there wasn’t.

It’s eerie to see the new tower blocks rising behind Cambridge Heath Road in Joan Littlewood’s ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’ of 1963 – where Barbara Windsor gets her knickers in a twist with the return of her errant husband James Booth – but you can still catch the car-free streets, the cart-horses, the pubs and the lovely old patter. Ronnie and Reggie Kray, it is rumoured, provided security for the production of ‘Sparrows’; Peter Medak – working with an excellent script by Philip Ridley – excelled himself in 1990’s ‘The Krays’, with his biopic of Bethnal Green’s famous pyschopathic icons.

That was the good old days. It’s not only the Krays that have passed on, the old hovels of Hoxton and beyond have alchemised into designer bars or artists’ lofts. I don’t know if video artist William Raban lives in one of the latter, but a mention should go to his beautifully, poetic meditations on the East End.

Meanwhile, sadly, the gunplay still goes on. Since Guy Ritchie’s ‘Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’, the streets provide the battlefields for an endless series of lesser and lesser Cockney gangster movies. Okay, they’re worth a laugh. But, nowadays, guv’nor, truth be told, if you’re looking for credible, relevant and modern depictions of working-class London life – or crime – you’ve got to go south of the river. Or watch the box.

The East End Film Festival runs from April 19 to 26 at Genesis , Rich Mix and Rio cinemas and Hoxton Hall. Head to the official site here

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