Surprisingly neglected in film, Birmingham is best known for being home to the Peaky Blinders and some of the best curry houses in Britain. We take a look at some of the most notable depictions of Britain’s glorious second city.
One of the dark passages which separate Birmingham’s ‘tunnel-back’ houses, 1954. (Photo: Bert Hardy)
Recently the scene of Tom Cruise hijinks for the next installment of Mission Impossible, Birmingham, and the West Midlands in general has seen something of a cultural revival over the last half decade – mostly thanks to the flatcap wearing and chiselled cheekboned Peaky Blinders. Cillian Murphy and co. The popular BBC historical crime drama has been distributed far and wide, bringing Black Country accents to the masses.
Whilst like Liverpool, Birmingham serves a popular filming double for London due to costs, it is an uncommon host for a film. It’s a place much better known for its music – classic rock icons Led Zeppelin, Electric Light Orchestra, Black Sabbath and The Moody Blues can all trace their roots to the city. Birmingham was also at the centre of the ska scene with UB40, Steel Pulse and The Beat being a representation of a multi-ethnic hub that was influenced heavily by Caribbean and South Asian immigrants in the post-war years.
A snow-covered barge on a Birmingham canal, 1939. (Photo: Humphrey Spender)
The city has also been home to numerous influential soul and RnB acts such as Laura Mvula, Joan Armatrading and Jamelia. The diversity in music and also in food (if you can’t get a good curry in Birmingham, you won’t get one anywhere) has sadly not managed to translate on screen but that’s not to say there aren’t some hidden gems that give us fresh and invigorating insight into Britain’s second most populous city.
Perhaps the best and most famous film to depict Birmingham unexpectedly comes from the mind of an Egyptian-born Canadian. Atom Egoyan was one of indie cinema’s fastest rising stars in the mid 90s after being an integral part of the Toronto New Wave a few years previously. After critically acclaimed ventures with the erotic thriller, Exotica and grime legal drama, The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan moved to adapt revered Irish author William Trevor’s novel, Felicia’s Journey.
A West Indian family sit down to their evening meal in Birmingham, 1965. (Photo: Central Press)
Starting off in a stifling, judgemental Northern Irish town before moving to Birmingham, Felicia’s Journey follows the titular teenager who goes searching for her boyfriend who impregnated her then ran off to join the British Army. She, like many from Ireland, came to the West Midlands vulnerable but with hope but Felicia, who is played by Elaine Cassidy, is specifically searching for a father for her unborn baby.
A titanic pillar of the Industrial Revolution, the city was famed for its textile production and the development of the steam engine. As a result of thriving factories, blue skies were blackened by soot and smoke and it’s this Birmingham that Felicia walks into. It’s not the Birmingham of the Bullring or Jewellery Quarter or Michelin starred restaurants – Felicia’s Birmingham is grey and gloomy, a sort of Dickensian Midlands where everything clangs and anxiety lurks behind every street corner.
Back to back slums in Birmingham, 1955. (Photo: Raymond Kleboe)
It’s in Birmingham where she meets the embattled Hilditch, played by the great Bob Hoskins. He’s an outwardly kindly man but kindly in a way that is very clearly masking a debilitating darkness underneath. This is a creep of a man, stuck in his self-pitying sadness, a Norman Bates of the Black Country but instead of dressing up as his dead mother, his house exists as a shrine to her overbearing presence. Their relationship is marked by obsession, manipulation and unspoken traumas, of predatory behaviour that is devastatingly common by men who feel they have a right to a woman’s body and soul. Felicia experiences all of the dreariness Birmingham has to offer with its poverty and dead end jobs, it’s a film that’s all gloom and no bloom.
Starting off as a social realist drama, Felicia’s Journey teases itself as a twisted thriller before splitting into an intimate portrait of family and trauma. It’s a story of children unable to find the light out of the shadow of the parent, of even too much love being poisonous enough to form a wrath of evil. The sepia tinged colour palette of the picture represents the mood of the story as well as its setting because Felicia’s Journey never makes its way to middle class suburbia, it remains shunted in the tenements of working class life, never to escape. It’s a starkly honest depiction of poverty and isolation in a city that whilst welcoming to strangers from far foreign lands can be brutally unforgiving in more ways than one.
A view down Inner Ring Road showing the new Albany Hotel, 1965.
Another film that portrays the mercilessness of the West Midlands is the controversial, 1 Day. Riding the wave of British hood flicks such as Kidulthood, Harry Brown and Shifty, 1 Day does as the title says, it follows the nihilistic lives of gang members around across 24 hours in Birmingham. Shot on the streets of Handsworth (best known nationally for playing host to a number of riots throughout the 1980s), the film’s cast is made up entirely of locals and generated intense debate in the Midlands over the merits of the movie. Many residents deplored it for so-called glamourising gang life whilst others criticised its depiction of young black men but it would be remiss to ignore that Birmingham has gangs just like any other major city on the planet.
Shot on a miniscule budget and written and directed by Penny Woolcock, 1 Day takes a simple noirish plot (big time gangster gets out of nick and wants the cash they are owed) and transports it to the streets hustling of Birmingham. Woolcock herself is not stranger to making films in Birmingham – her 1997 feature Macbeth on the Estate is an adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy set on the somewhat infamous Ladywood Estate.
Row upon row of cars in the carpark of a Birmingham factory. The ratio of cars to inhabitants is higher in Birmingham than anywhere else in Britain, 1939. (Photo: Humphrey Spender)
1 Day was actually made with the assistance of the police and various community leaders for ‘authenticity’ as Woolcock sought to paint a vividly realistic picture of gang life in Britain’s second city. One of the reasons the film caught on locally was because it hit those nerves. Anyone that knows Birmingham saw locations they walk past every day and the film offers a glimpse into the lives that often go unseen and unheard, for some, it was too close to home. But for younger audiences, much like Kidulthood a few years earlier, it chimed because it was real. It meant a lot to hear Birmingham accents on the big screen and see the West Midlands make it onto a marquee.
1 Day didn’t lecture or moralise, it just shone a bright light on the underside of Birmingham, it represented the authentic reality of Midlands streets that aren’t always the nicest place to roam. Life can be fraught and short, beset by anxiety and paranoia, something 1 Day tapped into and with Birmingham life so neglected on screen, it remains an important film for British youngsters.
With Peaky Blinders becoming a runaway success, it is not unfailingly optimistic to think that more Birmingham based stories are going to be on the way, uncovering the vastness of tales this multicultural, historically important city has to tell. And hopefully, in the years to come, it will also produce a few filmmakers of its own.
