Customer Reviews

Up the Junction

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It's a surprise to everyone (including yours truly) when beautiful socialite Polly Dean gives up a life of luxury in opulent West London to go and live in a grotty flat in ruthless Battersea and work at a chilly chocolate factory with a bunch of raucous, moral-less, bee-hived slappers.
Such is the plot of 'Up The Junction' (the title refers to Clapham Junction Railway Station around which much of the film is set), a gritty but reassuring drama in the vague style of 'Cathy Come Home'.
Although Polly's reasons for abandoning her pampered lifestyle are a bit obtuse - she alludes that it makes her sick ('yeuchh' is how she describes it), and she appears genuinely happy in her new environment of sling-backs, pop culture, abortion and random drunken violence.

Polly gets involved with Sylvie and Rube; two dayglo sisters straight from the 'Knees Up Muvva Brahn' school of tarts-with-a-heart-of-gold; and their mother - a twitching, screeching harpy.
She also finds herself a boyfriend - Peter: a gold-digging charmer with ideas well above his furniture-removal-boy station.

'UTJ's main bone of controversy was a long, heart-breaking abortion sequence. Terminations were illegal in the UK at the time the film came out with the law just on the cusp of change, and while it does appear slightly preachy, it's vitally handled sympathetically.
From the disgusting hardware store hiding an appalling upstairs sideline, to the screaming culmination at victim Rube's home; the whole section is sickeningly believable.
Nothing explicit, just unpleasant sweaty close-ups of panic-stricken, mascara-lined faces, mouths howling to the Heavens between curses, in emotional pleas for respite.
All this is offset by with a dream-like stroll by Polly along Wimbledon Common, where she seems to glide through all the stages of life. Babies wail, couples grope, oldies stroll hand-in-hand, with everything in-between and particularly poignant is the sight of a tiny black toddler feeding a swan three times the size she is.
With Manfred Mann's smashing soundtrack at full volume it all seems a little clumsy and crass - but it works.
Director Peter Collinson ('Fright', 'the Italian Job', 'Straight on Til Morning') has a nose for realism, and utilises it to the absolute maximum - hitting hard when he has to, but still finding beauty and humour in even the most bleak and difficult of situations.

'UTJ' looks like a forceful history lesson, but unlike 'Quadrophenia' or 'the Knack' it's no meaningless nostalgia trip or tourist film for the modern viewer. It has brilliant locations (showing London as it exists no longer), the starkly beautiful Battersea Power Station, a marvel of 1930's modernism, seems to be observing every scene - dominating the industrial sky-line like a gothic Hammer castle, only relinquishing its surveillance at the end credits.

The cast is great too. 70's scream queen Suzy Kendall plays Polly; the impossibly handsome Dennis Waterman is Peter; notable theatre actress Maureen Lipman is Sylvie and the unfortunate Rube is played quirkily by disappeared-without-trace Adrienne Posta.

No frills on this one: rude, garish and brutal - but compelling, funny and human at the same time.
The dvd transfer is excellent; intimately revealing the exquisite nature of the simple personal stories hidden away in the vast 'Scope framing.

Up The Junction is an issue movie (abortion) illustrating the class system in England. Features a groovy soundtrack by Manfred Mann. The Battersea coal power station plays a supporting role as the ever-present background to their lives. This was the same structure featured on Pink Floyd's Animals (1977) album cover and, more recently, in the movie Children Of Men (2006).

[DW]