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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
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAPWvdJnoH8.
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.”
