DVD Review: ‘Peggy’ First Emerged in ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’
By Larry Jaffee
As Barbara Windsor leaves East- Enders after 15 years of playing Peggy Mitchell, I thought it would be fun to take a look at her first major show business success, as co-star of the 1963 British film Sparrows Can’t Sing, which I was able to watch on my multi-format DVD player via a PAL disc I bought from Amazon.co.uk . The movie opens with a young Babs sitting in a window sill, singing her heart out to the whole world or no one in particular about life’s disappointments. You can see the opening scene at .
Everything we love about Peggy is reflected in what seems like a younger version of her. One wonders why the EE creative team never made use of Windsor’s singing voice. (She recorded an album, of which the Walford Gazette still has a few copies for sale on cassette and CD; let me know if you’re interested in purchasing.) The camera then scans down to various East End slices of life, capturing the sights and sounds of a cockney neighbourhood not unlike Walford, and it was filmed in the real East End borough of Stepney. The story settles onto Babs’ character Maggie finding out that his errant husband Charlie has come home after two years at sea. Meanwhile, Maggie, mother to a baby and another toddler, has set up a new household with a busdriver named Bert, who’s also married to someone else. A few years behind and not affluent enough to reflect the coming “Swingin’ London” scene, this tight-knit community seems to know everyone’s business and is quick to protect its own (e.g., Maggie). Charlie’s reemergence causes waves in the hood. Apparently he and the missus have had a stormy relationship, and one assumes when the heat in the kitchen became too hot Charlie signed up for a two-year merchant seaman stint. Now he’s back to claim his woman, and pick up where they left off.
Charlie walks the dramatically changed streets with his suitcase, packed with gifts from his travels. Surveying what looks to be a casualty scene from the Nazi blitz during WWII, he asks, amazed, “Where are all the houses? This used to be my street.” Many houses, including Charlie’s former residence, have been cleared out for high-rise apartments, signifying London’s changing appearance. Building tension, the first half hour of the movie deals with Maggie’s relatives and friends trying to shield her from Charlie, who’s not having much luck locating his spouse. At one point, he knocks on the flat of a large West Indian family with the sounds of calypso filling the room, whose jovial head, a dead ringer for Patrick Trueman in his younger days, produces not the Maggie who Charlie is looking for. It’s all fairly light-hearted and comical.
Behind another door another ethnic group is engaged in a dance class. Charlie visits her employer, a Jewish caterer and his mother, who claim that Maggie doesn’t work there any longer, and they’re unaware of her address, not fooling anyone, the least being Charlie. The scene reflects the East End’s once Jewish flavour, and again the city’s cosmopolitan melting pot. Charlie ends up back at his old stomping ground – the pub – where he no doubt caused more than one drunken disturbance, and he gets more reactions from the punters, “Oh no, here we go again.” When Charlie and Maggie finally do reunite, she attempts to fend off his romantic advances, gently protesting that she wasn’t counting the days he was going to return from his journey. On a second impromptu encounter on the street, while Maggie is pushing a pram holding their daughter, she cracks almost immediately when an over-the-moon Charlie surmises he’s a dad.
Even Maggie doesn’t believe her brief claim that Bert got her pregnant while Charlie was at sea, a testament to Windsor’s range of emotions within a few seconds. Despite feeling a little guilty over how good Bert has been to her and the babies, Maggie’s ambivalence about the entire situation lasts less than two minutes when it’s obvious she still has strong feelings for her errant spouse despite his drinking and womanizing. She’s still not over Charlie, no matter what fireworks are in store for the combative couple.
As often happens in EastEnders’ Queen Vic, the love triangle reaches a showdown at the pub when Bert unexpectedly makes an appearance. He realizes that he’s powerless, and comments to a bystander that he was planning to go back to his wife any way. Among the extras in the last pub scene were the notorious East End gangsters, the Kray brothers, with whom Windsor was friendly in real life at the time. (More EastEnders trivia: Martin Kemp a/k/a Steve Owen co-starred as Reggie Kray in the 1990 film The Krays with his brother Gary after their 1980s hair band Spandau Ballet ran its course. They’re just wrapping up a reunion tour, see page 2.)
Sparrows Can’t Sing was based on a play, whose director Joan Littlewood also directed the film at a time there hadn’t many female directors. In her 1998 interview with the Walford Gazette’s Tim Wilson, Windsor marvels how “Sparrows somehow captured people’s imaginations.” (The full interview is reprinted in Albert Square & Me: The Actors of EastEnders.) Windsor tells how she was brought over to New York for the 1963 premiere for publicity, and appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. “I was really feted and it was a marvelous experience all the way round. The reviews were fantastic. It was this cockney film that opened at some little artsy cinema and caused quite a buzz.”
Windsor is right about the reviews. The New York Times singled her out for playing the “pint-sized wife with all the perkiness and eccentricity of a bouncy English sparrow.”
The New Yorker called the film “a smasher…. a hurly-burly of sight and sound, we’re swung from dock to slum to park to pub on the whirling wheelpin of East London.” Its critic Brendan Gill wrote: “Not a moment strikes me as unnecessary.” When it debuted theatrically, Sparrows Can’t Sing was also notable for using subtitles for American audiences. A few weeks after it opened at the Manhattan art house cinema, some viewers complained the cockney dialect was too difficult to understand. Some even suggested dubbing over voices the British voices with American actors, but the film distributor wisely decided against that approach. Wrote The New York Times’ critic Bosley Crowther: “This isn’t a picture for anyone with a logical mind or an ear for the English language. The garble of Cockney spoken here is as incomprehensible as the reasoning of the characters who speak – and that’s profound.”
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