Raining Stones

Bob and Tommy rustling sheep

Now available in DVD from Koch-Lorber, Ken Loach’s “Raining Stones” is a reminder of how powerful he can be when he focuses on the lives of ordinary working people trapped in poverty. Nobody can gainsay the importance of films such as “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”, “Land and Freedom,” and “Carla’s Song” that deal with civil war in Ireland, Spain and Nicaragua respectively. But when he turns his attention to people treading water in contemporary Great Britain, there is more opportunity for humor and depth of characterization.

In “Raining Stones,” Loach could have hardly selected a more mundane subject, namely the stubborn and ultimately foolish determination of a chronically unemployed Irish Catholic father to scrape up money for his daughter’s communion dress. When the film begins, Bob (Bruce Jones) and his good friend Tommy (Ricky Tomlinson), also unemployed and Irish Catholic, are somewhere in the northern English countryside trying mostly unsuccessfully to rustle sheep. When they finally bag one and bring it to the local butcher, they discover that it is mutton from an older sheep–an unmarketable meat for the most part. The butcher buys part of it and they try to peddle the rest at a local pub. When they take a break and order a couple of pints, they notice a poster on the wall asking for contributions to help out an injured man. The dialog between Bob, Tommy and the barmaid captures both the plight of the people depicted in the film as well as their attempts to cope with their situation through humor.

Bob: (pointing to the man in the poster) How’s that Joe Young going on?

Barmaid: Aye, you know he fell off the bloody roof.

Tommy: I know. And he wasn’t even employed bloody legally, was he.

Bob: That means he won’t get a penny back.

Barmaid: Joking aside, we’re having a bit of a collection. See if we can send him to Lourdes.

Tommy: Did you hear about the kid from Liverpool in the bloody wheelchair they took to Lourdes? They got him to the water’s edge and he couldn’t get in ’cause his legs was twisted, so they had to hire a little crane and pick him and the wheelchair up over the water and submerge him. And when he came out, they all had a look at his legs, and his legs was still twisted, but the wheelchair had new tires on it.

“Raining Stones” gets its name from the words spoken to Bob by his father-in-law, a Labour Party functionary who works in the local Council office: “For the working class, it is always raining stones–seven days a week.” As a socialist and an atheist, the father-in-law can’t understand why Bob wants to spend good money that he doesn’t even have on a communion dress. But for somebody with so little of worth in his meager existence, the sight of his daughter walking down the church aisle is enough to justify any sacrifice. His daughter loves the idea of a beautiful new dress but can’t quite figure out the meaning of the ritual. The idea of drinking Christ’s blood does not make sense to her at all, no matter how hard her dad tries to explain it.

Since Ken Loach is very sophisticated politically, I can easily imagine him making a political point about Great Britain going backwards in time to the early days of capitalism, when sheep rustling by newly dispossessed peasants was just one among many tactics for survival. Additionally, Bob’s wife decides to apply for a job sewing garments at home–the kind of piecework done by working people in the early days of manufacturing. The contractor supplies the material and sub-par wages and she supplies the tools (a sewing machine) and labor. In keeping with the general misfortune of Bob’s family, her sewing is deemed inadequate by the contractor and she is fired before she starts.

The plot of the film revolves around Bob’s attempts to come up with the funds in an area where jobs are in short supply. In keeping with the distorted character of the new British economy, he finally lands a job as a bouncer in a disco but is fired the first night on the job after he beats up a drug dealer who has hired Tommy’s daughter to peddle at the club. In an earlier scene, she has told Tommy that she is working in a department store and gives him money for beer and cigarettes. He probably sensed that she was up to no good but lacked the courage to confront her. Bob did have that courage but not the good sense to pick a cause he could not possibly win.

Jim Allen

“Raining Stones” is the finest Ken Loach film I have seen. It was written by Jim Allen, who also wrote “Land and Freedom.” Jim Allen, a member of Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labor League, died in 1999 at the age of 73. The following is from a World Socialist Website obituary. As should be obvious, the issues dealt with in “Raining Stones” was very close to his heart:

The internationally renowned socialist playwright Jim Allen died on June 24, 1999. He became ill last Christmas and in February inoperable cancer was diagnosed.

Allen is a key figure in British theatre, television and film, best known for his long collaboration with director Ken Loach. He was born in the Miles Platting area of Manchester on October 7, 1926, the second child of Kitty and Jack Allen, Catholics of Irish descent. His father was a labourer who couldn’t find work during the depression. Jim attended a series of Catholic schools, moving from one to another without his parents’ knowledge. At the outbreak of the Second World War he was 13 years of age. He decided he had had enough of formal education, left school a year early and got a job in a wire factory. Again he didn’t tell his parents.

He had a series of jobs before being called up into the army in 1944, at the age of 18. He joined the Seaforth Highlanders and served with the British occupation forces in Germany. Allen was imprisoned for fighting outside a public house. It was there that a fellow inmate first roused his interest in politics.

Once released, Allen read voraciously— The Communist Manifesto and other works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. He became passionately interested in the writings of Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck and Jack London—especially his book People of the Abyss.

Though he had experience of the brutality of the church when he was beaten as a child for not going to mass, Allen did not reject Catholicism until he was in his twenties. He broke with religion when he realised that it was a barrier preventing him from educating himself. From then on he hated the church, which he saw as tyrannical and oppressive.