It’s both exciting and disquieting to discover great filmmakers whose work wasn’t properly recognized in their lifetimes. That description fits Britisher Alan Clarke, who died of bone cancer in 1990, virtually unknown in the U.S. except for the 1986 comedy “Rita, Sue and Bob Too.” The 12-film Clarke retrospective Friday through Jan. 30 at the Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago more than bears it out.
Clarke’s work is unknown stateside because all but three of his more than 50 films were made for British television. During the ’70s and ’80s, he was a contemporary, and artistic peer, of such celebrated BBC mavericks as Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh and Kenneth Loach. (Frears once called Clarke “sort of the best of all of us.”) Like the others, Clarke specialized in realistic social dramas and comedies-usually on working-class subjects-from a largely (but never predictably) labor-progressive perspective.
Where Clarke stands out is in the fierceness, laser focus and tightly controlled rage in his work. Loach, Frears and Leigh paint diverse, realistic but essentially bleak portraits of post-’70s Britain. But none get as bleak as Clarke. He was, perhaps, the most effectively dissonant anti-Thatcher voice in British TV or movies.
His most incendiary work-“Scum,” “Made in Britain,” “Contact” and “Elephant”-comes later in the schedule. But both “Road,” showing at 6 p.m. Friday, and “The Firm,” at 7:15 p.m., show Clarke at his toughest, edgiest and most uncompromising.
“Road” (1987), which boasts early appearances by David Thewlis (the brilliant psychopath of Mike Leigh’s “Naked”) and Jane Horrocks (the hilarious bulimic of “Life is Sweet”), is Clarke’s startling visualization of Jim Cartwight’s 1986 play. The most theatrical of his films, it’s a succession of ferocious monologues and encounters, most delivered directly to the camera, as characters prowl through the gray streets, abandoned buildings or bare houses of England’s impoverished North, relentlessly followed by Clarke’s steadicam.
“The Firm” (1988) is a jollier film-a comedy, in fact-but what it says about Britain in the ’80s is just as disturbing. The actors include British working-class movie stalwarts Gary Oldman and Phil Daniels. If you don’t watch closely, you may believe that what you are seeing is a particularly nasty mob war between two crazed and surly criminal gangs. Actually, Oldman’s crew and their bloody antagonists are “merely” two rival soccer fan clubs battling over turf.
The 1974 “Penda’s Fen” (4:30 p.m. Sunday) was Clarke’s feature directorial debut. Shot in rural England, with music from Edward Elgar’s “Dream of Gerontius” as a persistent background (Elgar himself is impersonated in one dream scene), it has an unabashed lyricism and poetic shine, which his later movies tend to avoid. This is a fine, compassionate tale of a sensitive, alienated, latently homosexual schoolboy and his rite of passage.
Sunday’s companion piece is “Diane” (6 p.m.). Made in 1975, with an amazing lead performance by Janine Duvitski, “Diane” is as harrowing and convincing a portrait of incest and its psychological consequences as any film has given us.
At their best, Clarke’s films seem less like dramas than documentations of actual life-obviously what he was aiming for. That’s the illusion we get in “Diane” and “The Firm”-the legacy of a neglected cinematic genius. Though beautifully shaped, designed and articulated, these films don’t seem staged. They seem just to happen.
The Film Center is at Columbus Drive and Jackson Boulevard; phone 312-443-3733.
