This Glasgow on Film series highlights films created in and around Glasgow over the years, from micro-budget amateur fare to top-of-the-range Hollywood productions, with a view to fostering viewing (so no spoilers here).
That Sinking Feeling (Forsyth, 1979) Credit: GTO/BBC
It’s the late seventies and four out of work teenagers decide to pull off a heist of stainless steel sinks from an Armitage Shanks warehouse. Even so brief a description as that tells you something about That Sinking Feeling, and Glasgow Films more generally — they seem to delight in those moments where the absurd meets the quotidian, where ostensibly grim realities and stark details of life find themselves pulled together and formed into ridiculous wholes. It’s a fusion we’ll come across time and again across this series, but That Sinking Feeling is a prime example to start with.
I must begin with a distinction, however: some films are Glasgow Films and some films are made in Glasgow. For clarity, think of hot tubs or vacuum cleaners, insofar as not all hot tubs are jacuzzis, but all jacuzzis are hot tubs, and similarly not all vacuum cleaners are hoovers, but all hoovers are vacuum cleaners — just because a film is made in Glasgow, that doesn’t make it a Glasgow Film. That Sinking Feeling is a Glasgow Film — so what’s the difference?
To establish its hometown credentials, the picture, Bill Forsyth’s first film, was shot in Bridgeton and Parkhead, as well as Dennistoun, Kelvingrove Park, Springburn, Bishopbriggs Railway station, and Cowcaddens, amongst others. Most of the cast were either members of the Glasgow Youth Theatre, or else just folk Forsyth found in a local community centre. The film is not just one set in and starring Glasgow and Glaswegians; it’s about these people, the city, and the sort of odd stories that seem to be peculiar to the Dear Green Place.
Without giving the game away, the four leads — Ronnie (Robert Buchanan), Wal (Billy Greenless), Andy (John Gordon Sinclair), and Vic (John Hughes) — are out of work teens with nothing much to do. They plot to steal sinks from a warehouse and sell them, with a plan involving cross-dressing disguises and a potion, amongst other things. There’s a delight in its daftness, a counterpoint to the mundane and downbeat realities of late 70s poverty and youth alienation. Despite such weighty issues lingering in the background, that special sense of humour one finds in Glasgow provides the bridge between these social issues and the absurd, not to say surreal, elements of the plot. It is this interplay between the real issues of Glasgow and its humour that mark That Sinking Feeling as an archetypal Glasgow Film.
Especially to anyone more familiar with Forsyth’s other pictures, particularly Gregory’s Girl (1981) and Local Hero (1983), That Sinking Feeling will strike them as coming from the same emotional place, even if it has a slightly meaner edge than those later films. If seeking out the film, do go for the BFI rerelease. Curiously, for reasons best known to themselves, when MGM brought the film to the US, they re-dubbed the voice track with Edinburgh accents; the BFI rerelease restores the original Glaswegian.
Anyone with an abiding interest in Scottish film, youth culture, or just good overlooked comedies could do a lot worse than looking out for That Sinking Feeling, the first Glasgow film of many more to come.
That Sinking Feeling is available to be streamed via the BFI Player.
Words by Adam Nicholson
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