SPARROWS CAN'T SING

Returning home after two years at sea, Charlie Gooding searches in vain for his wife Maggie, who is living with bus driver Bert in a new block of council flats. Then, holding his timorous brother Fred hostage in the Red Lion, Charlie issues an ultimatum that Maggie must come to, him. Fred's wife Bridgie sends their daughter Nellie to fetch Maggie who, unable to resist Charlie despite her sympathy for Bert, agrees to meet him later in the park. When Charlie realises that Maggie's baby Christabel is his daughter, he takes immediate steps to move his family into his mother's house. It is not until that evening at the pub that the triumphant Charlie comes face to face with Bert. To prevent the longanticipated showdown, everybody closes in on Bert, who philosophically settles for a reconciliation with his own wife.

"One of Joan LittIewood's particular strengths as a stage director is her ability to find a style an overall rhythm which exactly evokes the mood of a play. In Sparrers Can't Sing (stage version), she used exactly the same jolly mixture of song and dance and breakneck speed to achieve the very different overall effect of a gently stylised, often luminously beautiful commedia dell'arte in miniature where as with all miniature painting the execution was more important than the likeness. Sparrers Can't Sing never was a realistic portrayal of Stepney and its inhabitants. ... At times, though, the film version (promoted in the linguistic scale to become Sparrers Can't Sing), threatens to crack wide open in a confusion of styles inviting comparisons which should be irrelevant with reality… Sparrers Can't Sing, in fact, is at its best when at its most formal and unforced for example in the sequence when Charlie goes to a vague address in Cable Street in search of his wile and moves through its four floors in a wondering voyage of discovery: on the first floor a couple of Indians squatting motionless in the middle of a furnitureless waste; on the second, a group of Africans who sympathetically offer a substitute Maggie, and cheer him up with a joyful impromptu matingdance; on the third. a small boy solemnly confessing to a welfareworker that he was guilty of breaking into a offlicence and later being found drunk on the premises: on the fourth, some wild mittleEuropean festivity." (Tom Milne, "Sight and Sound", n. 2, spring 1963, p. 92)

Director: Joan Littlewood.
Screenplay: Stephen Lewis, Joan LittIewood, dalla commedia di Stephen Lewis Sparrers Can't Sing.
Director of photography: Max Greene, Desmond Dickinson.
Editor: Oswald Hafenrichter.
Art director: Bernard Sarron.
Music: James Stevens.
Canzone: "Lionel Bart", interpretata da Barbara Ferris.
Sound: Kevin Sutton.
Peter Medak.
Cast: James Booth (Charlie), Barbara Windsor (Maggie), Roy Kinnear (Fred), Avis Bunnage (Bridgie), Brian Murphy (Jack), George Sewell (Bert), Barbara Ferris (Nellie), Griffith Davies (Chunky), Murray Melvin (Georgie), Arthur Mullard (Ted), Peggy Ann Clifford (la moglie di Ted), Wally Patch (il guardiano), Bob Grant (Perce), Stephen Lewis (il becchino), Victor Spinetti (Amod), Jenny Sontag (Momma), May Scagnelli (la nonna), Fanny Carby (Lil), Ybotha Joyce (Yootha), Janet Howse (Janet), Queenie Watts (Queenie).
Production company: Donald Taylor per la Carthage.