Director: Ken Loach / Year: 1969 / Color / English language / English subtitles / MPA rating: PG-13 / Runtime: 111 min

An excerpt from Neil Young’s Film Lounge, March 2006

Is there a more popular British film among British audiences than Kes – which remains, all these years later, the only Ken Loach picture that everybody seems to like? Strangely, the film isn’t that well known overseas – even though Loach himself is now rather more venerated abroad than at home, and the story is a simple, universal, timeless one. This may well be down to the broad Barnsley accents in which almost all of the characters speak – not easily decipherable by those in the south of England, never mind viewers from farther afield. But the unmediated accents are a crucial element in locating Kes so vividly within a specific place, time, and class: a tough South Yorkshire mining village in the late sixties, evoked by a limited number of real-life locations (school, home, shop, working-men’s club).

The only viable economic choice for the area’s young men is to go “down the pit” – a prospect which fills scrawny, undernourished teenager Billy Casper (David Bradley) with horror. His loutish older half-brother Jud (Freddie Fletcher) has been a miner for several years, but still lives at home with Billy and their mother (Lynne Perrie) – both boys’ fathers having long since vacated the scene. Hassled at home and a misfit at school, Billy prefers to spend his time wandering the nearby countryside – where one day he chances upon a kestrel’s nest.

We’ll leave it there for the moment…