Snatching Victory from the Jaws of Defeat: A Kind of Loving

Before making his first feature-length film, A Kind of Loving, John Schlesinger made 24 documentaries for British television in addition to Terminus, the award-winning thirty-minute documentary for British Transport Films (BTF) about Waterloo Station. Over lunch with BTF's producer-in-charge, Edward Anstey, a protégé of the pioneering documentary maker John Grierson, Schlesinger came up with the idea of a day in the life of a railroad station, speaking as if a railroad station were a living person. “It's a microcosm of what's going on in a city,” he said (Mann 2005, 168). Schlesinger never lost this sense of the city as a protean space. Documenting the urban landscape, which meant recognizing the essential strangeness and vitality of what was completely familiar, was the jumping off point of his entire career and of many individual films. In Billy Liar, Schlesinger's second feature-length film, Billy's daily existence in a dreary Yorkshire town is established before we share his outrageous fantasies, because it is the supposedly dull reality that spawns the fantastical.

Unlike Billy Liar, A Kind of Loving is focused exclusively on the concrete, everyday lives of characters whose inner fantasies are not shown. We are given a sense of what those fantasies might be when the male office workers look at magazines of nude women and when women office workers gaze into shop windows. (One shop window contains a manikin of a woman in a bridal dress.) On the surface, the film conforms to the realist conventions of Free Cinema films of the period, but, as we shall see, Schlesinger's unique style may also be felt in the film's subtle characterizations and muted comedy.

By the time Schlesinger signed a contract with Producer Joseph Janni to do the film, several films by the now well-known Free Cinema directors had already appeared and been successful. Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961), a film that Schlesinger admired, bears certain resemblances to A Kind of Loving in that both were shot in poor neighborhoods in and around Manchester in the grainy documentary style of Free Cinema, in which deep focus shots hint at the totality of the environment restricting the characters’ lives.