Friday Night Movie Number 93 – Joby

 

A bit of a literary classic for you all this week. ‘Joby’ by Stan Barstow who also wrote ‘A Kind of Loving’ is the story set in the mid 1930’s of an 11 year old boy who over the course of one summer finds he has to grow up very fast.

This young boy on the brink of going to Grammar School finds the adult world of relationships, illness and deception creeping into the formerly solid world of Joby, his family and Joby’s friend Snap. The film opens with the scene showing Joby’s mother packing to go into hospital so that she can have a mastectomy. Joby is packed off to stay with an aunt whilst his mother is in hospital and although he still hangs round with his old friend Snap, he falls in with new friends not all of them who might be considered as suitable for a Grammar school boy. He gets involved in acts of petty theft and and even meets a girl, played by a very young Joanne Whalley and feels the stirring of attraction to her, something that he had been unable to feel before.

However as well as becoming aware that he is maturing as a person Joby also realises that all is not right with his family and that his parents marriage may not be as rock solid as he may have previously assumed. His father, played by Patrick Stewart of Star Trek Next Generation fame, is revealed to be not all we may assume him to be when we see him at the start.

This is the film of a book that I recall studying for CSE English Lit when I was at secondary school and I am delighted to see that is available to view. This film was made as a TV movie in two parts in 1975 but has been ‘stitched together’ as one file. Technically the film is of OK quality but there are a few extraneous artefacts in it and it does seem to have originally been  a ‘gallery copy’.

I enjoyed this movie and I hope you do. It’s a gentle but also gritty and realistic portrayal of a young boy coming of age in a northern English town prior to the outbreak of World War II.