The second of Ken Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty's run of Scotland-set films, Sweet Sixteen is set on a bleak estate in the former shipbuilding town of Greenock. Newcomer Martin Compston puts in a powerful performance as the teenager Liam who turns to drug-dealing in an effort to escape from a life of restricted opportunity and hardship. An angry attack on the waste of young lives created by unemployment and poverty.
The era of the British New Wave came of age with John Schlesinger’s comedy, one of the enduring films from the movement that crucially combines humour and literary pedigree with its ‘kitchen sink’ realism.
Richard Attenborough is unforgettable as ‘Pinkie’, the brutal gangster who seduces and grooms a simple waitress, Rose (Carol Marsh) in the belief that she could incriminate him in a murder.
In this sensitive and ground-breaking drama, Malcolm McDowell plays a passionate young man who has developed a degenerative disease. In despair he decamps to a home for disabled people where he meets a woman with polio (Nanette Newman) who instils him with hope, leading to a passionate relationship.
