Why British cinema is obsessed with the underdog

What is it with British filmmakers and their love of underdogs? From the days of Ealing Studios onwards, the British have always delighted in telling stories on screen about plucky small-timers fighting back against the big bad bureaucrats or gaming the system.  

Responses to Roger Michell’s new comedy-drama The Duke after its first screenings at the Venice Festival last week are revealing. This is a modern-day counterpart to an Ealing comedy. It tells the true-ish story of Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent), a 60-year-old taxi driver from Newcastle alleged in 1961 to have stolen Goya’s painting of the Duke of Wellington. He said he committed the crime partly because he was so resentful at having to pay a TV license when he didn’t even watch the BBC.  

Most of the British reviewers adored the film. Rapturous reviews called it “delightful”, “uplifting”, “difficult to resist” and promptly tipped it for Oscar and Bafta glory. However, other responses were more muted with some calling it “contrived“ and “a crowd-pleaser” that nevertheless “tries to please a bit too hard”. They were suspicious about all the tea drinking, period detail and whimsical humour. They felt they had seen it all before.  

Everyone, though, agreed that this was a very British affair, yet another of those familiar yarns about an underdog taking on the establishment.  

One important point should be made about both about The Duke and the Ealing comedies to which it pays such reverent homage. Those plucky underdogs are never entirely lovable or honest. In their own quiet way, they are generally very subversive, and that’s why we like them.  

The glory of Broadbent’s performance in The Duke is that he shows us Kempton’s wilfulness and obnoxiousness. Those qualities are also shared by Alec Guinness in his Ealing films. There was something sinister and strange about those nervous bank clerks, inventors or squinting, toothsome thieves he played in comedies like The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955). As critic Kenneth Tynan wrote of him, Guinness’s particular genius was for playing eccentrics, “men reserved, blinkered, shut off from their fellows and obsessed. Within such minority men, there is hidden glee, an inward fanatical glow”.  

Historians discuss the community spirit at Ealing but Guinness was often a man alone. So is Broadbent for large parts of The Duke and he certainly has that inward fanatical glow Tynan describes.  

Early on, Kempton’s quixotic, one-man campaign against the TV license fee is driven as much by perversity as by idealism or sympathy for downtrodden elderly television watchers he claims to represent. When he starts a petition to ban the license, nobody signs it. He won’t stop talking and the only opinion that matters to him is his own. The customers in his taxis find him unbearable. So do his bosses who are always looking for an opportunity to sack him and tell him to “fuck off”. Even his wife (Helen Mirren giving a very good impersonation of Coronation Street’s Hilda Ogden) is in a state of near-constant exasperation with him.  

Of course, just as Guinness could project a beatific Stan Laurel-like innocence, Broadbent is also ultimately very likeable. He makes even the sternest judges laugh. He refuses to be browbeaten by the authorities and will always stand up for the oppressed as long as it gives him the opportunity to climb back on his soapbox. In his blunt and ingenuous way, he is very articulate too.   

“In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in,” George Orwell writes in his famous wartime essay about the English, The Lion and The Unicorn. Kempton illustrates Orwell’s point. He is convinced that the authorities are flaunting natural English justice by squandering vast amounts of money on Goya paintings when they could be investing it in the social welfare of people like himself instead.   

“England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly,” Orwell also wrote, again sentiments that Kempton would endorse.  As a Geordie ex-bus and taxi driver, he is close to the bottom of the pile and bitterly resents being patronised by bosses, police, TV license inspectors, court officials or prison warders. The fuss over the painting of the Duke of Wellington, a man he reviles, disgusts him.  

Over the course of The Duke, the bitterness gradually melts away. Kempton’s character softens. As if to emphasise that this is a quintessentially English story, director Michell ends the film with a beautiful choral rendition of William Blake’s “Jerusalem” on the soundtrack. By then, Kempton has single-handedly brought consensus and harmony to the troubled land. Class divisions miraculously cease to matter. Implacable, cold-hearted bureaucrats suddenly begin to show tenderness and humanity. Tears come to every eye. This is the traditional triumph of the underdog.  

The Duke wasn’t the only film in the Venice selection featuring a leading British actor in an underdog role. Uberto Pasolini’s Nowhere Special has James Norton as a Belfast window cleaner and single dad. John (Norton) is suffering from a terminal illness. With only a few months to live, he has to prepare his son for his death. John, beautifully played by Norton, is a quiet, observant man. Nowhere Special has more in common with old Ealing tearjerkers like Mandy (1952), about a mother’s struggle to give her deaf daughter a better life, than with Ealing comedies. However, John is yet another in British cinema’s very long line of underdog heroes, just as much an outsider as Broadbent’s Kempton Bunton in The Duke.  He too is continually patronised by clients, doctors and the social services, or treated in offhand fashion by some of the men and women who want to adopt his child.  

Writer-director Pasolini produced The Full Monty (1997), one of the most successful British underdog comedies of recent times, in which steelworkers who’ve lost their jobs reinvent themselves as male strippers.  

It’s far easier for most audiences to identify with characters like Baz (Robert Carlyle) in The Full Monty, John in Nowhere Special or Kempton Bunton in The Duke than with action-heroes, James Bond-like spies or the dashing, Hugh Grant-like leads in romantic comedies. The underdogs have mortgages to pay and families to support. They are often dealing with debt or bereavement. They have to show huge resilience simply to keep afloat. We root for them as they wrestle with everyday problems we too probably have faced. We suffer with them, collude in their outlandish schemes, and share in their eventual triumphs.  

The best of the British underdog stories benefit from their mix of realism, pathos, and comedy. They have a grit and emotional depth not found in more escapist mainstream fare. They tend not to be set in metropolitan London or to have those well-spoken middle-class protagonists found in most other British movies.  

Ken Loach has made many films about underdogs. In Raining Stones (1993), My Name is Joe (1998), I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Sorry We Missed You (2019), he continually tells stories about characters being ground down by a system which denies them their self-respect.   

The unemployed hero Bob in Raining Stones needs £100 to buy a dress for his daughter’s first communion. He will do anything to get the money. He’ll clear up drains or even try to rustle sheep. The film has plenty of knockabout humour similar to that found in The Full Monty or the Ealing comedies. The key difference, though, is that Loach absolutely refuses to provide the feel-good finale in which social injustice vanishes, different classes come together and everybody claps for the small-timer in the docks. Loach’s movies are bleaker and far more honest. His underdogs stay underdogs. Their trajectory is downward not upward. He and his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty follow logic, not sentiment. There is no angel waiting in the wings to end the cycle of exploitation. That is why Loach’s work, for all its humour and humanity, can’t compete with softer-centred stories like The Full Monty at the box office.  

It’s not as if the British are the only ones making underdog movies. The Italians make them and so do everybody else. All those neo-realist classics like Bicycle Thieves (1948) or Umberto D (1952) are also stories about small-timers living very precarious lives. Loach often cites Czech New Wave movies like Closely Watched Trains (1966), directed Jiri Menzel who died this week, or Milos Forman’s Loves of a Blonde (1965), as among his most important influences; they’re underdog stories too. US director Frank Capra’s films with Gary Cooper or James Stewart trying to right wrongs or sacrificing their own life opportunities to help others are also underdog stories. However, the British seem more obsessed with this kind of storytelling than anyone else.  It’s worth remembering that Charlie Chaplin was an Englishman, even if he did make his films in Hollywood. His signature character “the tramp” is still arguably the most famous underdog in cinema history.  

Blame a national inferiority complex. Put it down to class or guilt about a social system that keeps characters like Kempton Bunton in the margins. Attribute it to sentimentality or to the sheer pleasure to be had in telling stories about small-timers mocking and defying authority. Whatever the cause of their obsession, British filmmakers can’t get enough of underdogs. We don’t just make more movies about them than anyone else. As The Duke also shows, nobody does underdogs better than the British either.   

‘The Duke’ and ‘Nowhere Special’ are screening at the Venice Film Festival. Their UK release dates are yet to be confirmed.