| Looks and Smiles | |
| Director: | Ken Loach |
| Producer: | Raymond Day Irving Teitelbaum |
| Starring: | Graham Green Carolyn Nicholson |
| Music: | Marc Wilkinson |
| Cinematography: | Chris Menges |
| Editing: | Stephen Singleton |
| Studio: | Black Lion Films Kestrel Films |
| Distributor: | ITC Entertainment |
| Runtime: | 104 minutes |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Language: | English |
Looks and Smiles is a 1981 British drama film directed by Ken Loach. It is based on the novel of the same name, written by Barry Hines. The film was entered into the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, where Loach won the Young Cinema Award.[1]
In an interview for the book Loach on Loach, the director said that the title of the film is taken from a line from Anton Chekhov: "How did girls attract boys when they were young? In the usual way - with looks and smiles."[2]
A disadvantaged young man tries to get by in Margaret Thatcher's England. Writing in his book The Cinema of Ken Loach, Jacob Leigh comments: "Looks and Smiles reveals the depression people felt in the industrial North of England in the 1980s; but it is as depressing as Mick's life. ... Loach's characteristic attention to detail renders the film a period piece."
The film was shot in black-and-white entirely on location in Sheffield.[3] There is some Yorkshire dialect in the film, although not as much as in previous Loach-Hines collaborations such as Kes and The Price of Coal.
A review in The New York Times gave the film a positive review and praised the acting, but complained about Loach's policy of using the actors' natural accents on the grounds that that "a great deal of the dialogue remains unintelligible to the American ear."[4]
A 2016 Guardian article wrote, "Even the most devoted fan found 1981’s Looks & Smiles painfully miserable".[5]
When asked why he was unhappy with the film in an interview for Loach on Loach, Ken Loach said, "It's too lethargic and gently-paced and when I think about it now I want to give it a kick up the arse."[6]
Ken Loach considered the film a failure and turned to making documentaries for several years afterwards,[7] saying that the film failed to "create the outrage in the audience that should have been there". He also considered it "the end of an era" as he avoided long camera shots in subsequent films.[8] In support of the film, it has been held up as one of Ken Loach's film that does not propagate one political view heavily, as opposed to Fatherland[9] or Land and Freedom[10]