Sparrows Can't Sing

Wonderful British kitchen-sink comedy/drama from Joan Littlewood. Wonderful, beautiful Barbara playing the titular Maggie makes this film a true delight and a snapshot of the East End in the early 60s. Was it really like this? Who cares. A thoroughly enjoyable and repeatable watch.

Well it all starts rather inauspiciously with Barbara Windsor singing the Lionel Bart penned title song. Good? Well, no - not very. Thereafter we discover that she ("Maggie") used to be married to "Charlie" (James Booth) who has just returned from being at sea. Thing is, their marital house has been demolished and she has moved on to a new life with bus driver "Bert" (George Sewell) and he is determined to get her back. The whole thing has a made for television look to it and though there is a formidable array of British comic acting talent on display, I found the writing to be really weak with the limitations of Miss Windsor as an actress being writ large as she really struggles to carry this (very lightly) comedic enterprise - riddled with innuendo and stereotype - for ninety minutes. It perhaps doesn't help that the narrative centres around life in a fairly pedestrian East End (of London) community and that after a short while there are so many suds you could run a Chinese laundry for a fortnight. It may well have resonated better in 1963 when it offered a plausible depiction of life in a small, tightly knit, community within a big city, but I am afraid now it has lost what potency it had. Cinema nostalgia it probably is if Cockney is your natural dialect. For the rest of us, it's just all rather dull.

I've never watched a movie with more shouting in it! Why does ever actor shout his lines?

James Booth's character is a boorish oaf. God knows what Windsor's character was supposed to have seen in him.

Only reason it gets two starts is because of the location shooting.

As distinct from East Enders PC version..Get the impression that things really were like that in a neighbourhood where people still.spoke and looked English! Would like to see Lionel.Bart's musical version and wish Joan Littlewood had made more films!

I saw this film when it first came out; it got very bad reviews at the time and most of my friends hated it, but I loved it then and have been haunted by the theme song ever since. For a while it was impossible to find any references to it--in fact, this is the first database where I have found the title or any information about it, though I have checked a number of commercial sites trying to find it on video. I still remember it as a charming (somewhat sentimental) and very funny comedy of a type that the British film industry did very well at that time. More recently their best work is more in a surreal or caricatural mode (such as _Cold Comfort Farm_, which is brilliant in its own way), but _The Full Monty_ caught some of the charm of the kind of comedies of everyday life that I think _Sparrows Can't Sing_ was one of. Now I just wish I could see it again.