Poor Cow

"Gawd," says Joy, as she walks wearily home through a London slum to her sordid flat and the petty thief she lives with. "If anyone saw me now, they'd say, 'She's had a rough night, poor cow.' " She has had more than that. But no need to worry; the important thing about this poor cow--and this film--is that the rough nights and days cannot get either of them down. Despite its scruffy scene and downhill theme, Poor Cow is not really another of England's angry proletarian tragedies. The film tells its story with humanity that is never sentimental and humor that never jokes.

Documentary in style, Poor Cow opens with a closeup of Joy (Carol White) in pain. She writhes and thrashes, panting. A nurse puts an anesthetic mask over her face, and the camera moves down her body as the doctor's hands deliver the child and start it breathing. Though her husband Tom (John Bindon) is a crude, bullying, small-time criminal, Joy manages a pathetic simulation of middle-class domesticity--living in a development house, airing baby Jonny in a swanky pram, serving hostessy sandwiches to Tom's accomplices while they are plotting a caper.

When Tom is jailed, Joy takes up with one of his friends. Dave (Terence Stamp) is a burglar, but he is affectionate with Jonny and tender with Joy. Unfortunately, he is not so considerate of his victims; after attacking an old lady who happened to be around when her house was being burgled, Dave is sent up for a twelve-year stretch. Promising to wait for him, Joy starts divorce proceedings against her husband. She works as a barmaid and as a nudie model for the kind of moist-lipped amateur photographers who don't use film in their cameras. Then she begins taking men to bed more for fun than profit. "If I turned professional," she tells a chum, "I'd lose the pleasure of it." Joy dreams about Dave and visits him regularly, but when Tom gets out she lets him move in with her again.

What makes this drab case history into a compassionate and likable film is the rare combination of fresh young talents that Italian-born Producer Joseph Janni (Darling; Far from the Madding Crowd) has recruited from British television. Terence Stamp, 28, is the only member of the company with any movie experience to speak of. John Bindon, 24, is an ex-merchant seaman who has never even acted before. Poor Cow is also the first film for TV Director Kenneth Loach, 30, who has achieved a personal, idiosyncratic immediacy with a hand-held camera and ad-libbed dialogue that sounds natural enough to have been taken off a tape recorder.

The movie, though, belongs to 24-year-old Carol White, another emigre from TV. She invites inevitable comparison with Julie Christie; Producer Janni "discovered" both of them, and there is a notable physical resemblance. Miss White's range as an actress remains to be tested, but the gamut she runs here is already fairly long--slob and sexpot, worried mother and girl in love. She is totally convincing as a woman who can find a bit of fun and some fatuous hope by riding with the punches--whether they come from Fate or some other guy.

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