Steptoe and Son (1972) - film review

Albert and Harold Steptoe are a father and son rag-and-bone team who scrape a living in the less salubrious area of London.  Despite numerous attempts, Harold has failed to escape from his father and, now into middle-age, he fears he will never be able to live his own life.  Then he meets Zita, a beautiful young nightclub stripper who, for some reason he cannot fathom, finds him irresistibly attractive.  For the first time, Harold has found true love, and the couple marry after a whirlwind romance.  But, as ever, Albert can be relied upon to totally destroy Harold’s dreams...

With the British film industry facing terminal decline in the 1970s, film producers had the bright idea of transposing popular TV comedy series to the big screen, in the misguided belief that it was the sitcoms that were keeping all the punters at home.  Steptoe and Son proved to be more resilient than most to this transition from small to big screen, mainly because it could fall back on the talent of its writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and its two stars, Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett, who formed an unbeatable double act.

When the film was made, Steptoe and Son was one of the most popular comedy series on British television, mid-way through its second run, which ended in 1974 when the principals grew tired of their roles and decided to call it a day.  The concept of the situation is ludicrously simple but proved to be a goldmine of comic possibility, which Galton and Simpson mined for all it was worth.  A father and son are trapped in a relationship of mutual dependency, the former ruthlessly playing on the latter’s conscience to ensure he never leaves home.  In what is the classic prison-gaoler set-up, the son is eternally imprisoned through a deluded sense of duty towards his exploitative father.  Steptoe and Son is essentially a kind of Pinter-esque love story, in which the father and the son are bound to one another through a combination of love, hate and skulduggery.   This tragic scenario was virtually replayed in real-life by Brambell and Corbett, who became victims of their own success.

The film recycles ideas and situations in episodes from the TV series, but with a larger canvas to paint on, it offers a more substantial storyline, one which sees Harold married and able to enjoy the fruits of fatherhood, albeit all too briefly.  The jokes are noticeably harder to come by that in the original TV show, as the writers seem to be more preoccupied with pathos than humour.  The one decent gag involves a naked man, an easily shocked female on-looker and a box of Flash detergent - possibly the most inspired example of product placement in film history.

Cliff Owen’s direction is surprisingly bland and characterless, compounding the dullness of the narrative and the lacklustre contributions from the supporting artistes.   The magical rapport between Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett salvages the film and gives it a poignancy and depth which the TV series often lacked, particularly in the later years.  The success of this film resulted in a sequel, Steptoe and Son Ride Again.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?