The Stars Look Down

Some two decades before the Kitchen Sink cinema of the British New Wave, Carol Reed made this serious, committed film about life in a northern mining community, co-scripted by AJ Cronin from his own novel. The central romance, though by no means all roses, dates the picture (Redgrave, an idealistic miner's son, goes to university, and temporarily forgets his political resolve when he marries Margaret Lockwood); but the mining sequences have a degree of authenticity (above-ground sequences were shot at Workington, in Northumberland), and the film ends with a rousing call for nationalisation of the industry, to 'purge the old greeds'.