Ken Loach's period adventure Black Jack screens at Siskel Film Center.
by J.R. Jones
Following a long stretch of British TV work, proletarian director Ken Loach returned to the big screen with this 1979 children's adventure, adapted from a novel by Leon Garfield and set in 1750 Yorkshire. For a social realist like Loach, the story seems unusually macabre and fantastical: young Bartholomew, apprenticed to a draper, is tending to one of the hanged corpses his boss surreptitiously recovers and sells to the local medical college when suddenly the huge man revives, explaining that he survived the noose by shoving a bent spoon into his windpipe.…[ Read more ]