SPARROWS CAN’T SING (1963) SEQUENCE ANALYSIS

lledomroig
20 abr 2021
5 Min. de lectura

This extract is part of the film Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963) based on the play Sparrers Can’t Sing (1960) by the same director Joan Lillewood. After the initial credits, in which the camera has introduced us the main female protagonist singing the film’s song, we follow Charlie, the protagonist, from a boat to what was the land of his old house. In here, we see that Maggie has left. We don’t know who Maggie is yet, we just know the obsession Charlie has about her but from the beginning, the author is showing us who’s going to be the conductor and the driving force of the whole story: Maggie, the lady singing “Sparrows Can’t Sing” in the initial credits. The extract we are about to analyse of Sparrows Can’t Sing (Joan Littlewood, 1963) is located at the very beginning of the film after Charlie has come to his old neighbourhood looking for his lost love with no result. He is trying to find Maggie, his wife, after two years of traveling, to find his house has been destroyed and that she is not longer there. The extract belongs to the first house he goes looking for her in which he finds a lot of people, but not her. His old neighbours have sent him to a place where Maggie could be, but in this old and poor building he finds no luck either. Carrying his suitcase and a big teddy bear, he leaves like he arrived.

The sequence starts with Charlie in the street surrendered by kids helping him with his luggage. This puts us in context. This detail, that is repeating during the whole film, reveals the moment in space and time where the film is located: the East End of London in the sixties during the baby boom era. These kids are showed in mob, like a plague, and they follow and mock the protagonist, just like these new generation of “teenagers” will do with their parents. By the way they are dressed, we realise they come from poor families, so we can expect it to be a poor neighbourhood. This scene shows the old part in the contrast between the old London and the new one, that will be shown scenes later. Once Charlie gets in the building, he seems to be alone. The lighting gets darker inside and it looks like an old fashioned and dirty house with a broken old toy next to the wall. We appreciate the expectation on the scene, as we hope that Charlie will find Maggie there. With a game of opening doors and a light work in darkness and light, we will see the sad reality: she is not there. Her searching leads the narrative. Suddenly, just after him, a pair of little boys appear in the hallway next to the toy, to stare at him. He opens the first apartment to find a single-parent family eating on the floor. The old man can’t understand English, this makes evident the influence of immigration in East London, the other heritage people that came to London looking for a new life. This is also seen with the black community living in the second apartment, that need to live all together after the bombing. The easy way he can snick into the building shows how poor and miserable the people that lives there are, but the film presents them happy and comfortable with their lives, capable to enjoy what they’ve got now. This happens as well in the last floor apartment where another community is singing and having fun. This attitude reveals the growing optimism of the swinging sixties. The extract starts with hope, he thinks he’s going to find Maggie there, but it ends with another kind of hope, humanitarian one, while he’s still without her.

The people he finds contextualise the film in this transition from the New Wave. The film is set in the post-industrial era after the Second World War, and we can appreciate that with the bomb damage that is shown in the first scene after the credits when he starts searching for Maggie. He finds ruins where his street was located. Unlike the industrial cinema of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1961), the opening of the film is not a factory or a working context but Maggie singing the main theme of the film in a joyful way, giving credit to the arts and the fashion through her perfectly backcomb and outfit. Her voice plays a gentle and inviting music in a Hollywood style, dotted with sensualism and that shows and reflects both the change to a sexual revolution and the melancholy of other life as well as Hollywood giving credit to British cinema. This song is not just a metaphor of the time but a reflection of the story that’s about to come between Maggie and Charlie.

The main theme in this extract is the desire of meeting lost love again. Charlie shows up desperately trying to find his wife, but she’s completely missing, nobody seems to know where she is. Besides, he feels like a stranger in his own neighbourhood, people treats him like an exotic traveler. He feels sorry for leaving, and he even cry for Maggie at the black people’s apartment. Here we discover Charlie’s sweet side, we see him portrayed as a good man trying to find his wife and the regret of leaving her. He is persuasive and fighter, he’s not going to give up on finding Maggie and will do whatever that takes to get her back. However, later on, we will realise that Charlie is not a good man to Maggie, and that losing him was the best that could have happened to her. Even so, the camerawork makes us empathise with Charlie, as we seem to be him for a while in the building by a POV and a hand-held camera with movement to immerse us in his reality, which serves the New Wave way of filmmaking: the outdoors and outside studios. However, the scene is recorded in American or medium shots and there’s no close-up of Charlie. Although it has got New Wave characteristics, we can’t consider Sparrows Can’t Sing a New Wave film, because in 1963 the end was near and the start of the swinging London was already there as we can also see. Hence, this film belongs to the transition of that new British cinema making.