The real bite of the film is how little help the government is. Various officials are condescending and accusatory as they ultimately break up the family and leave Cathy with nothing.

A bit like an epic film twice as long was heavily abridged, with major events zooming along and much of the information given in V.O. The tone is dry, almost cinema-verite-style as it describes the downward mobility of a middle-class couple, plunging through the lower social strata, sharing the fates of gypsies and foreigners along the way. The young Loach was untarnished by sentimentality and unsoiled by contrivances even while zeroed in on a clear-cut political agenda. Hard-hitting.

I think I get some of the Loach love now, starts well but ends up a bit one-note. As sad as the decline here is, knowing that Cathy and the travellers would be far, far worse off today is even sadder.

"American media just cannot contain such messages." http://illusionpodcast.blogspot.com/2014/12/episode-39-wednesday-plays-of-ken-loach.html

Obviously one-sided and about as nakedly propagandic as can be, but certainly not ineffective thanks to Loach's insistence on location shooting and other techniques to bring faux nuance. The verite style is well-implemented, surprisingly intense and gives the film some value independent of its director's reputation.

After a long while, a movie made me cry :(

The style is extremely episodic, with events crammed into brief scenes separated by jump cuts, making it feel much longer than its 77 minutes. But it's so shamelessly manipulative and one-sided that I found myself actually having conservative knee-jerk reactions. Because it really sets up Cathy and Reg as unimpeachable saints who are crushed and driven apart by the Big Bad System. I don't doubt that it's a realistic scenario but it's such a sledgehammer of misery that it's a bit over the top.

43 years has only made this more depressing: will humanity ever amount to anything more than a bunch of intolerable, "fuck you, I got mine" shitbags?