World Film Locations Glasgow

By Nicola Balkind

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-719-4

Contents

Maps/Scenes,
Scenes 1-7 1973 – 1984,
Scenes 8-14 1984 – 1998,
Scenes 15-20 1998 – 2001,
Scenes 21-26 2001 – 2003,
Scenes 27-32 2003 – 2005,
Scenes 33-38 2005 – 2011,
Essays,
Glasgow: City of the Imagination Paul Gallagher,
Cinema City: Glasgow’s Passion for Cinema Neil Johnson-Symington,
Glaswegian Comedy: A Distinct Sense of Humour Keir Hind,
The Gift of Constraint: Danish-Scottish Collaboration and the Advance Party Pasquale Iannone,
Glasgow’s Kitchen Sink: The Cinema of Ken Loach and Peter Mullan David Archibald,
Dear Green Shoots: Underground Film Making In Glasgow Sean Welsh,
Glasgow: Hollywood’s Film Set Nicola Balkind,
Backpages,
Resources,
Contributor,
Filmography,

CHAPTER 1

Glasgow

City of Imagination

THINK OF GLASGOW ON FILM and chances are you think of crime, gangsters, poverty and hardship. Looking over the list of films covered in this book, it is clear where that thought would come from: a large proportion of them deal with at least one of those themes. But to go deeper is to find that beneath that narrow thematic surface lies a breadth of different interpretations of Scotland’s largest city through cinema history. The title ‘city of the imagination’ is apt here, for despite – or perhaps because of – the hard and often bleak stories played out in Glasgow on the cinema screen, film-makers have continually allowed their minds to wander free from the limitations of tangible reality when looking at the city.

The camera uncovers beauty in places where it is least expected, and this is a key way that Glasgow has captured the imaginations of filmmakers. Both Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999) and Neds (Peter Mullan, 2011) are set in the broken-down housing schemes of 1970s Glasgow, but in both cases the bleakness of the characters’ situations is contrasted by the artful work of the films’ cinematographers, Alwin Kuchler and Roman Osin, respectively, who find images of beauty in lines of rubbish bags, graffitied swing-parks and seemingly bland architecture. In the apocalyptic romance Perfect Sense (2011), David Mackenzie presents an equally bleak imagining of a possible future, but the beauty in this scenario comes from the poignancy of Michael (Ewan McGregor) and Susan’s (Eva Green) doomed love. It’s a poignancy that is given weight by what could be termed the soul of the city in which it plays out: the cobbled streets of Glasgow’s Merchant City and the West End’s century-old sandstone tenements remain firm, speaking of the city’s own ability to withstand the pressures that will ultimately wear down these human protagonists.

The same tenements are also a visual marker in On A Clear Day (Gaby Dellal, 2005) on the steep streets of Partick, overlooking the River Clyde and the dockyards where the film’s story begins. But the effect is opposite and hopeful as the camera’s raised perspective foreshadows the hope that will ultimately be restored to the main character, Frank (Peter Mullan), by the story’s triumphant end. While such unmitigated success is exceptional for a character in a Glasgow-set film, the lightness and humour of the character’s outlook is not; just as film-makers have uncovered beauty in the unlikeliest of Glasgow locations, so they have often revealed the city’s humour in places where it wouldn’t – and some might say shouldn’t – be expected. This is less about the city as a location, more as a state of mind, and a Glasgow state of mind appears to be one that is laughing most of the time. It’s found in Comfort and Joy (Bill Forsyth, 1984), a sweet and funny film that tells a very sad story, and also in Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (Lone Scherfig, 2002), a film of humour and life in spite of its title. But it is another Peter Mullan film, Orphans (1998), that pins down something much darker and more quintessentially Glaswegian: that brand of gallows humour that asserts that no subject is beyond joking about. Indeed, the story of four adult siblings grieving their mother, with its mix of violence, religion, magical realism and hilarity, is one that could arguably only have been brewed in Glasgow.

Mullan is clearly a key figure, both in front and behind the camera, in terms of Glasgow on film. Of equal significance, but bringing a very different focus, is Ken Loach, the film-maker who directed Mullan to global recognition as recovering alcoholic Joe Kavanagh in My Name is Joe (1998). Loach has made three Glasgow-set films with writer Paul Laverty, four if you include Greenock drama Sweet Sixteen (2002), and the pair returned to the city to film a new feature, The Angels’ Share, in 2011. Loach always centres his stories on marginalized people and issues of social justice, and he and Laverty

While Glasgow has often been and continues to be used as a stand-in for other major world cities on film, it is in the moments when film-makers have captured the city unadorned, as itself, that the most enduring images have been created. In Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006), as the camera seems almost awestruck taking in the sight of the looming tower blocks of the title street, or in the deeply evocative opening shot of Death Watch (Bertrand Tavernier, 1980), beginning in the Necropolis and craning up to take in the whole sprawling city; in these moments Glasgow seems made for the cinema screen.

Moments like these are paradoxical, as they simultaneously make the city into a new, imaginary character on film and capture a specific historic moment in terms of the real city’s life beyond the screen. The Glasgow that Robert Carlyle’s George drives his bus around in Carla’s Song (Ken Loach, 1996) is, in the film’s fiction, the Glasgow of 1987, but at the same time, beyond the minor period adjustments, it is Glasgow as it looked when the film was shot in 1996. Bill Forsyth, Scottish director of cinema classics Gregory’s Girl (1981) and Local Hero (1983), summed up this paradox in typically pointed style with the onscreen note that introduced his first, Glasgow-shot film That Sinking Feeling (1980): ‘The action of this film takes place in a fictitious town called Glasgow. Any resemblance to any real town called Glasgow is purely coincidental.’ It is in that contradiction, in the space between real physical locations and the camera’s trick-telling stories, that the city of the imagination comes alive.

While Glasgow has often been and continues to be used as a stand-in for other major world cities on film, it is in the moments when film-makers have captured the city unadorned, as itself, that the most enduring images have been created.

Spotlight

Cinema City

Glasgow’s Passion for Cinema

Text by NEIL JOHNSON SYMINGTON

ONE OF THE MOST SURPRISING cameos in David Hayman’s film Silent Scream (1990) belongs to an art deco cinema, a gem of Glasgow architecture which appears transplanted in London. The ‘Vogue’ is revealed in all its illuminated glory once a bus destined for Soho drives past into the night. Underneath the soaring neon sign and vast canopy, a commissionaire holds open the tall doors for filmgoers coming and going. His resplendent coat, cap and white gloves personify the glamour of the cinema experience. It is not the experience of real-life Glaswegian Larry Winters, who stands near the entrance desperately drawing on his cigarette. Exhausted and miles from home, he leans against the curving tiles beside a poster for The Mind Benders, a cruel reminder of his state of mind. His life is about to take a tragic turn.

Silent Scream is a visually complex film which utilizes Winters’s poetry, overlapping memories and hallucinations to the extent that locations often seem unreal. Yet the only thing imaginary about the cinema is its name and suggested London location. The Riddrie, designed by architect James McKissack in 1938, actually stands in north-east Glasgow. Surviving as a bingo venue, it is one of Glasgow’s cinema crown jewels. And there were many others. An overpopulated city made the popularity of cinema inevitable, and as early as 1920, cinemas were sprouting up with such speed that Glasgow Corporation attempted to halt their construction. The courts overruled them. Hardly surprising, given Glaswegians’ insatiable appetite for film.

By 1935, Glasgow could boast more cinemas per capita than anywhere outside America, with total seating for 140,000 filmgoers. The names themselves promised prestige: Ascot, Coliseum, Embassy, Kingsway, Regent. In the city centre a filmgoer could easily find themselves in a palatial auditorium with 2,358 others in the Regal, or 4,367 in Green’s Playhouse – once the largest cinema in Europe. Architecturally, one stood out: the 2,748-seater Paramount on Renfield Street (now a disused Odeon), whose avant-garde modern design had been hitherto unseen in Glasgow’s Victorian centre. With its vast curving corner entrance and glowing facade, the Corporation praised the cinema for creating ‘a new landmark between Sauchiehall Street and Argyle Street’. It also enjoyed being Paramount’s busiest cinema outside America.

But impressive cinema architecture wasn’t the sole preserve of the city centre. The Riddrie, like many cinemas in Glasgow’s districts, was designed as a main attraction and an asset to its community. One local newspaper claimed in 1936 that crude provincial cinemas were finished: ‘The modern suburban cinema must now endeavour to equal, if not surpass, its city superior in matters of comfort and luxurious surroundings if it is to succeed.’ Another cinema to seize this challenge was the Lyceum in the shipbuilding district of Govan. Built in the Streamline Moderne style by renowned cinema architects McNair and Elder in 1937, the Lyceum – like the Paramount – maximized its corner site. Opening with the film We’re Going to be Rich was a heroic statement, but the Lyceum’s grandeur could not be sustained: even as a bingo venue it closed in 2006. Nonetheless, the impact of its entrance, comprising five tall backlit curving windows above a canopy, must have been dramatic. A hint is offered in David Blair’s The Key (2003), in which the building sets the scene for 1970s Glasgow; however it’s easily missed in this six-second vignette.

Cinemas in Glasgow provided a vital means of escape in the 1930s and 1940s. In Britain, people averaged 21 cinema visits per year in the mid-1930s; Glaswegians went at least once a week. Many visited far more. Bette Robertson – one Glaswegian out of potentially thousands – recorded in her 1937 diary that she went to the cinema four times in one week in April.

Twenty years later and cinema’s allure was fading. In 1958, Glasgow’s Evening Times reported that the ‘alarming drop in filmgoing is continuing’. More cinemas may have closed had it not been for their children’s matinee clubs, one of which is superbly evoked in Gillies Mackinnon’s Small Faces (1996), set in 1960s Glasgow. Thirteen-year-old protagonist Lex Maclean finds his own escape in a cinema safe from razor gangs. Wakened by the sound of a gunshot, he’s shocked but relieved to find the cinema packed with children watching a cowboy serial. As they all sing the ABC Minors song, a happy innocence surrounds him and, for a time, Lex forgets the horrors he witnessed through his baptism of gang-induced fire. The auditorium itself looks unremarkable, but had the shot been wider, its true significance would have been visible. This was inside William Beresford Inglis’s masterpiece of cinema design: the Toledo in Muirend (1933), a Spanish-American fantasy resembling an Andalusian palace. Its facade featured hacienda windows and balconettes; the interior was of Atmospheric-style containing themed decor; and the auditorium presented mock pantiled roofs and balconies along the walls surmounted by a painted night sky ceiling. The Toledo held out longer than most – until 2001. All that remains is the facade, the magic inside having been replaced by flats.

Glasgow today is a very different place from the one of the 1930s. That golden era of filmgoing would appear to be a historic phenomenon. Or maybe not. Despite having barely a tenth of the cinemas it once had, Glasgow still demonstrates the highest amount of filmgoing in the United Kingdom, with Glaswegians visiting up to six times a year, compared to the national average of just below three. Its cinemas are trailblazers too: the shimmering IMAX (1999) – Britain’s first titanium-clad building; the towering Cineworld (2001) – officially the world’s tallest cinema; and the Glasgow Film Theatre – formerly the Cosmo (1939), another of McKissack’s modernist cinemas – which receives nearly double the number of screen admissions than the nationwide average. Considering that the Glasgow population has been exposed to a cityscape once incredibly peppered with at least 130 different cinemas, perhaps this unquenchable enthusiasm for film is to be expected.

Despite having barely a tenth of the cinemas it once had, Glasgow still demonstrates the highest amount of filmgoing in the United Kingdom, with Glaswegians visiting up to six times a year.

O LUCKY MAN! (1973)

LOCATION

HM Prison Barlinnie, 81 Lee Avenue Riddrie, G33 2QX

HAVING BEEN FOUND GUILTY of a trumped-up fraud charge and imprisoned for five years, journeyman coffee seller Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) finally wins his release, having convinced the prison governor (Peter Jeffery) that – thanks to a conversion to Humanism – he has become a model prisoner. The prison sequence in Anderson’s film is comprised of several exterior establishing shots (library footage of Wormwood Scrubs); cell and office interior shots filmed on studio sets at Colet Court (the production base of Thames Television’s Euston Films subsidiary in the early 1970s); and, finally, on location outside the entrance to HM Prison Barlinnie. Security regulations in English prisons at the time made it impossible to film anyone actually coming through a prison doorway and so, for the only time in the production, filming moved north of the border. Anderson, a Scot, was delighted. In his personal diary he described the location and filming experience thus: ‘a large plain gate (only a pity the prison buildings could not be seen behind) and a splendid large wall and a good space of roadway, remote from through traffic, in front. Scottish prison officials of great pleasantness and tolerance of our absurdity.’ Rather appropriately given the compressed, metamorphic journey that Mick Travis takes through the penal system, shortly after filming took place Barlinnie’s world-renowned ‘Special Unit’ was opened; a facility that emphasized rehabilitative treatment of prisoners and produced former Glasgow gangster Jimmy Boyle, the prison’s most well known success story. * Jez Conolly

JUST ANOTHER SATURDAY(1975)

LOCATION

Abbotshall Avenue, G15 8PL and Achamore Road, G15 8QS

IN 1970S GLASGOW, beneath the glossy nightlife, beyond the dramatic architecture of an era long gone, there was a grittier world of greying concrete and anonymous tower blocks. Deeper still, there coursed an undercurrent of strain and conflict. Director John Mackenzie immediately draws the audience into this stark and unyielding environment in Just Another Saturday, part of the BBC’s Play For Today anthology and a narrative that focuses on a young protestor named Jon (played by Jon McNeil) and his experiences at The Orange Parade. Establishing shots of Abbotshall Avenue and its interchangeable high-rises connote desolation and gloom before the day has even begun. When John sets off from his flat to the protest the camera immediately settles on an unspoken darkness; the first shot being a view towards Clydebank. Just four years earlier, the Upper Clyde Shipbuilding Consortium had been refused a £6 million loan by the Conservative government under Edward Heath, leaving the shipping industry in a state of decline and many workers unemployed. Understandably there was still bitterness about this at the time and Mackenzie’s direction could easily be interpreted as a pointed comment on the sad history of the area. This is underlined further by his follow-up shots of flaking verandas, wandering children and dismal architecture. These elements, combined with some carefully placed point of view and tracking shots, gradually build an impression of disadvantage, injustice and inequality: three key motifs that weave their way through Mackenzie’s understated but unafraid portrayal of retro Glasgow. * Helen Cox

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