User Reviews

Not many films can claim to have resulted in a change in the law. "Cathy Come Home" is one of them.

This graphic, sympathetic depiction of a couple who become homeless in 60s Britain is still powerful. I watched just the eviction scene recently on TV and I felt intense anger at the injustice rising in me.

The film is plotted like a Greek tragedy - the couple's decline from prosperity is gradual at first, then accelerates horrifically. Unlike a Greek (or Shakespearian)tragedy, however, the characters are not the architects of their fate. They make mistakes, but their punishment is out of all proportion. They are the victims of a harsh and unfeeling system - but most of all of the hostile attitudes of their fellow citizens towards the homeless.

Most viewers at the time would have shared these prejudices - but the film showed them that there, but for the grace of God, they could go too.

The film gave a huge impetus to Shelter, the campaign for the homeless that had just started up. Few other campaigns except (later) CND have had such widespread support. Pressure from Shelter eventually led to a change of the law in 1977 which means that homeless families can no longer be treated as the protagonists of "Cathy" were (although the law certainly has its defects - for example the use of bed and breakfast as temporary accommodation, and its non-applicability to single homeless people).

"Cathy Come Home", if I recall rightly, was written for the BBC's famous "Wednesday Play" slot. Many brilliant plays were filmed for this series, including some early Dennis Potter, and that other influential polemical masterpiece "The War Game" - which the BBC refused to show in a cowardly acquiescence to Government pressure. "Cathy" shares with "The War Game" a quasi-documentary style, without commentary, which provides much of its realism. However the performance of the two leading players in "Cathy" is also perfect.

The review entitled "Ken Loach: the Leni Riefenstahl of the left" had me spitting nails when I read it. I have only just watched Cathy Come Home for the first time, although I have seen a number of Ken Loach's other films in the past. I find it shocking that someone could suggest that "If children weren't so inclined to be noisy and messy and unpredictable and demanding and expensive then the issue wouldn't be as serious". So, if children weren't, y'know, CHILDREN, and were robotic, and didn't require things like food, clothes and shelter, that the problem of homelessness would magically disappear? Also, the contraceptive pill was approved by the Family Planning Association in 1962, and considering the ages of Cathy's children and the time-scale of the show, it'd still have been in its very early stages and not as widely available, especially when people could barely afford to keep a roof over their heads. Yes, the film might be a little heavy-handed, but if it weren't for 'archetypal social propaganda', who would take notice? Would we all be sitting around under a Conservative government who don't particularly care for anyone but England's upper middle classes, waiting for a change that would never happen? Yes, homelessness is still an issue, but at its time of release, there was far less being done about it, and the prospect of families being separated was one faced by all those who lived in slum-housing. Which, after the film's release, was abolished. It's small minded attitudes people such as this who think that because they watch a film, and notice that there are still homeless people, that they can complain about people having children and the fact that Shelter did not build a home for absolutely everyone who needs one. I can only imagine that Australia is quite similar to working class 1960s London, otherwise how would you know so much?

What to say about this one? Heartbreaking, bleak, hopeless take on unemployment and overpopulation in England. It's not overindulging, it's not constructed, it just is, which makes it even worse to watch.

Basically you'll be watching the slow disintegration of this young couple that falls in love and tries to start a family. What begins as a love story, ends up exposing a social security system, completely incapable of handling the overpopulation, or the people it affects.

It's depression in film form. But to Loach's great credit, the point, the punch of this movie, never feels strained. If you liked this (if you thought it was good that is), My Name is Joe could be next Loach film you should look into.

Cathy Come Home is one of the bleaker movies i've ever seen. I remember some friends and i went to see a screening with the intention of going out to the bars afterwards. instead, we just all went home and drank alone...

very powerful, definitely worth a look. Cathy's hope and youth is gradually sucked out of her as she has children and slides down the economic ladder until she is completely broken. the point of the film is that the institutions designed to help get women like cathy back on their feet were traps that insured the women would lose their children. the two most notable scenes occur a) at the end when the government tracks her down and rips her children from her arms, only to leave her there sobbing b) when angry townspeople burn their gyspy shanty-town to the ground.

from the waning years of the English Free-Cinema.

Issues of morality - whether we agree or not with director Ken Loach's view of his characters - are not really significant here: what makes CATHY COME HOME such an enduring classic half a century after its original release is its essential boldness.

Produced at a time when television drama actually could make a difference to public opinion, and the BBC regularly produced single plays dealing with contemporary issues, CATHY COME HOME tells a straightforward tale of the eponymous protagonist (Carol White) and husband Reg (Ray Brooks), who begin in relative affluence yet end up sliding down the housing ladder until they are left with absolutely nothing. They are forced to lead separate lives, with Cathy taking two of her children to a prison-like hostel while Reg has to find an apartment of his own. The action culminates in a memorable sequence taking place in an Essex railway-station where an indifferent gaggle of Social Service workers take Cathy's children away from her, leaving her in a tearful heap, bereft of anything and anyone.

Stylistically speaking Loach's production was highly influenced by the British documentary film movement of the previous decade with its cinéma-vérité style of fluid action, short sequences and voiceovers including Cathy herself as well as a variety of so-called do-gooders justifying their particular behaviors, even though none of them appeared to want to help the stricken couple. In an era still wedded to the idea of studio-bound drama, CATHY COME HOME came like a welcome breath of fresh air with its determination not to sentimentalize its characters and single-minded commitment to exposing social ills.

The harrowing final scenes, as Cathy's children are taken into care, caused an outrage. Within days of the broadcast, Loach and writer Jeremy Sandford had been summoned to a meeting of Birmingham Council's Housing Committee, as councilors were furious about the ways in which they had been portrayed. The homeless charity Shelter was established in a wave of anger at the way people had been treated.

Fifty years on, some of the attitudes might now seem dated - especially the casual racism and the basic distrust of nonwhite people - but the problem of homelessness still remains. How many more Cathys are there still roaming the streets of Britain's inner cities, relying on hand-outs and food banks for sustenance?

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

Reg (Ray Brooks) and Cathy (Carol White) are young and in love, and eventually get married and have children. Reg has a good job, and all is going swimmingly, until he has an accident at work and his bosses refuse to pay him compensation. Unable to keep up with payments after the death of their landlady, they find themselves forced out of their home, and down into a never-ending spiral of increasingly unsuitable, uninhabitable temporary accommodation and bureaucracy that drives them apart and leaves Cathy in despair.

Last year, after announcing his retirement after making his last film (2014's Jimmy's Hall) Ken Loach surprised everyone and, as if to prove why celebrities should never use the word retirement, at the age of eighty made the incredibly well received I, Daniel Blake. But it also marked fifty years since his arguably most ground breaking, heavily impacting work premiered on TV, in the shape of this low scale production, that shone a light on the dire state of homelessness at the time, and actually brought about the formation of the charity Shelter, as well as significant changes in the law. Truly a testament to the power of film at its strongest...

It's ostensibly a drama, grounded in the cold, gritty reality of life, but depicting the bleak chain of events as it does, in its own way, it ends up playing out like an archetypal horror film, with the lead protagonists trapped in a chain of events forged by external forces that threaten to destroy them and everything they hold dear. The monster chasing them is the unrelenting, stony faced bureaucracy and prejudice of society and institutions, from which survival seems impossible. Loach further achieves this effect with the style he employs in the film, with the black and white frame that was still fairly typical at the time, and the various, opposing voice-overs, including the lead characters, that add to the eerie, isolating feel of it all.

A young pretender at the time it was made, Loach set his standard with this short, unsettling piece. His job is not to make entertaining films, or to make us happy, but to inform and provoke change with gritty, social realism. As he reminds us before the film finishes, everything that we've just seen really happened over the then last six months in Britain, so it's not like he doesn't do his homework. Regardless of your political persuasion, his sincerity to highlight what many more powerful people paper over is always to his credit. *****

I didn't see this when it came out but remember friends discussing it. It would have been on the Australian Broadcasting Commission Channel 2. Some how it always stuck in my mind and finally ordered the DVD. England was in a bad way after the War. War costs money and sometimes you wonder who won the war (or battle) as Japan and Germany seem to come out like Phoenix out of a fire. What went horribly wrong that so many people were left homeless, landlords allowed to rent hovels and the "No Children" clause. Separated families, men in one lodgings, wife and children in another. No visitations after 8pm. Sex obviously didn't happen before that time.

In 1966 it would be hard to envisage that Cathy Come Home was in fact a single play produced by the BBC. It was produced in a drama documentary style.

Upon its broadcast it was controversial as director Ken Loach was accused of mixing facts with fiction. The film led to the setting up of the charity Shelter and eventually led to the reform of housing protection laws in the UK.

Loach examines the plight of the homeless and how institutions that are meant to help end up being a hindrance that in reality break up families.

Cathy (Carol White) comes to London and meets Reg (Ray Brooks). They get married and have children. Reg has a nice job and they get on the housing ladder but when Reg has an accident at work and goes on benefits they go on a downward spiral of looking somewhere to live. Each time the housing is worse quality and its a vicious circle that they cannot break out of. In those days, people would not rent to those who had children, being homeless with young kids did not give you priority and it seems there was not enough housing at all.

As the film goes on we see familiar attitudes to the homeless situation, that it is their own fault, they are feckless, it is the fault of the immigrants who have come here from Jamaica and taken housing from the white folks.

In 1966 this would had been a shocking and provocative film. Carol White was a beautiful actress and we can see her eventually being ground down as her situation becomes hopeless. The final scenes of her losing her kids have still not lost impact 50 years on.

Ken Loach's "Cathy Come Home", one of the valuable society-tackling items of BBC's Wednesday Plays, offers a view of Great Britain far from its era-defining shots on glamorous mini-skirts, the Beatles and the swinging 60s. This is a wake-up call to those who'd take for granted that anyone with a decent salary - in a country as socially-advanced as Great Britain- would be guaranteed a home.

The story of Cathy and Reg, played by Carol White and Ray Brooks, echoes the tragedy of thousands of couples and families who found themselves entangled in unexpected complications within the most basic prospect of finding a house. It's set in 1966 and since the war, not enough houses were built to help people building their future and asking for one could be a soul-crushing experience. Well, it wouldn't be a Ken Loach movie if the ending didn't leave your heart overloaded with a mixture of anger and sadness.

Now, some detractors would label such a film as leftist propaganda, but Loach handles emotions very carefully and never lets them guide Ray and Cathy's actions, subduing them even in dramatic situations. And as if he was anticipating the objections, he lets voice-over do the job and some anonymous speakers explain how they ended up in a squalid house, an overcrowded building or a caravan, and also some well-dressed council or welfare workers explain the 'housing crisis' in words Cathy can understand.

Really it's a matter of arithmetics: so many demandants in the waiting lists for so few houses, some would technically have to wait for 350 years to get one. With facts such as these, a movie doesn't need a stand: filming reality is enough. And Loach with the power of his 16mm camera explains that this is an ordeal endured not by vagabonds or social misfits but working-class people, men who worked as miners, bus or lorry drivers, even military veterans. This is the Loachian approach as it would define his movies from "Cathy Come Home" to "I, Daniel Blake", half a century later (when things hadn't improved much).

Loach's oeuvre isn't that lengthy political leaflet but rather a Human Tragicomedy ("tragi" underlined) à la Balzac where people from Cathy Ward to Billy Casper, from Joe Kavanagh to Daniel Blake were such relatable embodiments on the realities underwent by the lower-class citizens that calling them fictional would be an insult. And that's because Loach was lucid enough to know that you can't just drop numbers and statistics on the nose and expect a visceral reaction: the disclaimer that concludes the story wouldn't have one tenth of its impact if it wasn't for the image of a distraught Cathy after she lived the ultimate tragedy, her devastation and confusion give their weight to the conclusion.

In fact, the ending -almost cynically- negates the impact of the story by saying that this tragedy was just one among the others, leaving the skeptical viewer alone with his own conscience. The narrative approach of Loach illustrates the infamous comment of Stalin that "one death is a tragedy, a million is statistics". By handcuffing an individual tragedy with the numbers, Loach directs a manifesto against the drawbacks of the English so-called welfare system. The story of Cathy becomes a portmanteau to hang all the absurdities of the housing crisis: flats that wouldn't allow children, councils blaming people over their homelessness or kids being thrown off a house because of insalubrity, but without any place to go...

Loach is also aware that he's dealing with people we conveniently feel sorry for but yet consider them, if not deserving, at least guilty for lack of anticipation. But for the most compassionate of us who wonder at the sight of a poor drunken beggar in the subway "how did he end like that?" Ken Loach shows us that the sliding toward poverty is easier than we'd presume: an accident, a death, unexpected pregnancy not to mention Kafkaian bureaucracy ... you don't need to go high to fall hard. And Cathy's nightmare is a succession of sequences that hardly last longer than one minute, giving you the vertiginous impression of someone climbing down spiraling stairs so fast the fall's inevitable.

She hitch-hikes from her rural town, she meets Reg, he makes her laugh, they marry, manage a flat that don't accept children, she's pregnant, he's got an accident and it goes downhill after that. It's interesting that the use of background music (the opening credits and "Stand by Me" during the romance) is abandoned once the troubles begin and the film turns into a gripping documentary-like experience. From panoramic shots on promiscuous places to much tighter images of three or four people in the same frame, Loach conveys a sense of claustrophobia that is quite effective and makes you feel like an intruder, which is the essence of militant journalism, showing the kind of reality we wouldn't want to see.

Handheld cameras like for true TV reports allowed Loach to give a realistic effect but not always deprived of cinema's vital artifices. The first powerful close-up is on an elderly man who's sent to a nursing house and the sadness on his face while his wife talks to the social worker speaks a thousand words. Naturally, the camera is more in love with White's beauty and the slow erosion of her youthful idealism. White's simply spectacular as the poor mother of three who comes from various psychological stages until she loses the grip on her emotions in the jail-like emergency homeless shelter. Her change of personality is like a subplot within the tragedy and the final nail on the coffin.

"Cathy Come Home" is the work of a director with a social conscience, cinematically absorbing and with the relevance of a historical document, a tragedy not deprived of ironies not the least is that a country where people's jobs can't allow them to get houses still permit jobs that consists of evicting them... when they do find a house.

This film is one of the TV drama that is often cited as one that showed how TV can be a force for good, how it can influence government policy and propel social change. It is a film that chronicled the trials and tribulations of a young mother who fell into poverty and homelessness. The screening of the film and the following impact that it had helped shaped public policy on housing, and spawned numerous other similar TV projects that highlighted social issues.

It was done with a good script and good actors, but the impact came from the faux documentary style that it adopted, such that the audience were made to imagine that what happened might just be real. There was no attempt at objectivity - Cathy was portrayed in sympathetic manner, nothing that happened can really be her fault, and the officialdom was unfeeling, severe and judgmental. The film is manipulative but many would argued that that's justified because the heart of the director was in the right place. It is the ultimate propagandist film, one that achieved its objective in spectacular fashion and showed aspiring directors how propaganda on social issues should be done.

But did the film actually do any good? It had a profound influence on housing policy and thus indirectly on the social development of Great Britain. For example, young mothers are now given priority on public housing, and this helped created a situation where young women think that having children would help them getting a council house. It is no accident that Britain has the highest incidence of teenage pregnancy in the Western world and this (and the consequent social problems created) can be argued to be the direct legacy of this film. Does it help with the problem of homelessness? Not a jot from the large number of homeless people we see in London and other British towns, a great proportion of them young men, and a situation that is probably worse than that of the 60's.

This film, and its many subsequent imitators, propagated the dishonest view that individuals who get into difficulties in life are largely blameless, and the government is the one to blame and the one to solve the problems. It, directly or indirectly, helped foster the view that individuals carry little responsibility for their own actions. It is, in essence, a "bad" film, one that no doubt done with good intention, but whose effect has been deleterious and damaging to society.

Firstly can I please put the record straight - this is NOT a movie, but a TV drama made by the BBC in 1966.

Carol White plays "Cathy", the mother, Ray Brooks the father. Through circumstances they find themselves destitute with nowhere to live.

Carol White's performance was absolutely without parallel, and I defy anyone who is a parent, to remain dry-eyed when the Social Welfare people find her seated on a bench with her children in a London railway station. The children are wrenched out of their mother's arms, the children screaming for their mother, and "Cathy" hysterical with emotion, trying to prevent their removal. How could we ever have lived with such a barbaric system? This drama served as a landmark in Social Services methods within the UK, and Carol White's superb portrayal will forever be regarded as instrumental in bringing about change.

I would like to be able to report that such things no longer happen in the UK, but I cannot. Perhaps in not such a heart-wrenching way, children are still removed from their families on the pretext of "child welfare" priorities. Priorities that are distorted by the setting of Government adoption targets - so just who is helping who here?

This is not family viewing, but is an important historical account of a time that none of us should be proud.

Everything about the drama has already been mentioned in previous reviews, but after 66 years this still packs a real punch.

It is not comfortable viewing, this has a lot to do with the performances of Carol White and Ray Brooks as an ordinary likeable couple who find themselves in dire straits through no fault of their own.

The drama focuses on the basic flaws in the housing system and the consequences on society for those with very little.

This must have been one of the first to use the docu-drama style. If it hadn't been for the occasional familiar face one might be forgiven for thinking it was real.

A one-of-a-kind production that perhaps affected society more than any other. It's amusing to see that this TV production was part of THE WEDNESDAY PLAY because it couldn't feel like any less of a play if it tried. Instead it's heavily infused with documentary realism, so much so that you could be forgiven for thinking it was an actual documentary. Fresh and involving, it takes the 'kitchen sink' genre to the next level with its depictions of poverty and poor housing, and is expertly directed and acted throughout.

Intense and devastating.

Tight closeups, an active camera always in the middle of everything.

It's a claustrophobic world for Cathy after she marries and has 3 children, as she passes from an apartment to, eventually, a shelter, where her husband is not allowed to stay.

"Cathy Come Home" can be found as one of the Special Features on the 2011 Criterion DVD of Loach's "Kes."

Cathy Come Home (1966) -

I wasn't around at the time and I obviously don't know a lot about what was happening, but Ken Loach has seen fit to make this film, believing that there was an issue that needed to be addressed.

While I agree that the housing and labour situations should never have become so bad and should have been dealt with better to prevent people from falling in to a slump, I can't help but feel that there were some stages skipped in this depiction in order to add pace to the families demise. For instance, nothing was shown about her taking on work at home or him trying to hold down two jobs or either of them getting further support from their families. Not to mention the lack of education that saw them having 3 children when they were already on the bread line for the very poor reason that "No one should be denied the chance to live", but what life did she bring them in to?

A lot of people will think that I'm cold hearted and callous and they may be right. I have been fortunate in my life to have been born in a less difficult time and to two parents who worked hard, but I have also been sitting in the dark of late in fear of the next electricity bill and spent many days in my life trawling around town to save pennies on essentials.

I understand how hard it is to live on the financial support of the government, the stigma attached and the lack of support in actually getting work at the Job Centre, although I am very grateful for the help I receive from my family and friends.

So, I'm not saying that those people as a whole deserved what they got, because they were lazy, because that can't have been true of all of them, but the central family in particular, seemed to be living in a cloud cuckoo land that still found money for alcohol and smoking, without being very proactive about helping themselves out of their troubles.

I genuinely feel for those people who had nowhere else to go and were let down by the system, but there were and still are so many that expect the world to give them everything and get their arse in their hands when they don't get it, that it's hard to know who deserves what.

As a result of all this, I found it very hard to feel the sorrow that I was supposed to for Cathy and her family, which says a lot, because I can cry at adverts.

The film moved very fast and because of the gritty way it's made, in a documentary type style, it's a bit messy and hard to follow, especially at the beginning.

It's all a bit of a jumble throughout, with various people/characters talking over each other and not even always the same conversation and it's not obvious to start with that time is moving forward quickly.

And thank God for the subtitles, because it was really unclear.

Basically, to quote Phoebe Buffet of 'Friends' (1994-2004) fame "It's not a wonderful life, it's a sucky life and just when you think it can't suck any more it does." And that's the gist of this film. It's very grim and I did have to wonder how they and others depicted had got in to that situation. It also definitely didn't have a happy ending.

For me in 2022, it was hard to see the point and the poignancy of it so many years after the crisis. And as such I didn't really enjoy it, although I could understand the importance that it would have had at the time.

As my Nan would have said though "She should have kept two legs in one stocking!"

360.98/1000.

I have seen several excerpts from and read reviews on this film, but as a mother - I don't think I could watch this film from start to finish. I have seen this drama-documentary featured twice on shows such as Top 50 most emotional TV moments and again tonight on Top 50 best TV dramas (UK). I've looked up info and was just wondering if anyone (from across the water :) ) can confirm that some of "Cathy's" children,(child-actors in the film) had actually been taken into care, in reality.. I seem to remember a mention of something like that on one of those shows. I don't recall exactly, but seem to remember somebody speaking of a direct connection / link, of this sort.

• it's playing on my mind - if anyone can put me out of my misery-?