Depressing and realistic family drama about the struggles of unemployment and poverty in 1930s Lancashire. The 20-year-old Kerr gives an emotionally charged performance as Hardcastle, one of the cotton workers trying to make life better. Interlaced with humour that brings a ray of sunshine to the pervasive bleakness, this remains a powerful social study of life between the wars, and was a rare problem picture to come out of Britain at the time.
Gert and Daisy accompany a crowd of Cockney children who are being evacuated to a stately home in the country.
In Ballyconnen, Emmy Baudine is a beautiful but disturbed young woman who works for the local priest. When the carnival comes to town, she encounters a handsome young boxer called Dan and lays his face open with her fingernails when he expects sexual favors from her. Hurriedly packed off by Father Corcoran to Yorkshire, Emmy is taken in by a farming family and manages to suppress the strange feelings of fascination and repulsion that she experiences in the presence of the opposite sex. Until, that is, the carnival comes to town and brings with it the vengeful Dan...
