Jerusalem hymn gives script power.
See this article about Jerusalem lyrics at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_time
It does give the film an odd power, in the strangely ironic way it's used. I still don't understand why the boys sing the hymn with such seeming alacrity.
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Yes, I find it hard to say whether the boys are being ironical or whether, without necessarily being able to explain it, they are in fact moved by the stirring tune and mystical words.
As prisoners whose lives have taken a wrong turning, do they inwardly hope for the redemption that the hymn foresees?
I am currently writing my dissertation on the representation of Christianity in British films. I have a theory regarding this:
Religion, certainly Protestant Christianity was not only alien to the working class of the British New Wave but also a symbol of oppression of the working class. In The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) a motif of the non-diagetic music is that whenever an image of oppression is shown, such as the high barbed wire fence of the borstal, it is accompanied the melody of the hymn and de facto national anthem of England, Jerusalem. This motif is taken to a height when a disenfranchised youth is arrested for running away from a borstal and is beaten and mocked by the police while his fellow inmates of the borstal sing Jerusalem lead by the borstals vicar.
Feel free to tear that theory apart if you wish.
Don’t Sillitoe and Richardson give us a rather teenage Trotskyist view of mid twentieth century England?
I’m not accusing the men themselves of such naivety, nor denying an element of truth in their account, but merely stating how the film appears to me 50 years later: authority is caricatured and the working class oppressed. These political blinkers certainly extend to the portrayal of religion and, as you suggest, the Church of England is seen as an instrument of establishment coercion.
In institutions like schools, the armed forces and prisons, weren’t C of E chaplains to some extent analogous to the commissars or political officers in contemporary communist states? Wasn’t part of their job to keep the inmates in line and guide them away from deviation? In some establishments, you were assigned on entry to one of three religions. If you did not claim to be Jewish or Catholic, you were automatically C of E. (When Moslems started appearing with immigration from Pakistan, they were sometimes classed as Catholics!)
By the way, isn’t using “Jerusalem” to symbolise the Church of England a touch ironic? The author of the wonderful words was hardly an orthodox member of the church and I think the composer was of a rationalist frame of mind.
"By the way, isn’t using “Jerusalem” to symbolise the Church of England a touch ironic? The author of the wonderful words was hardly an orthodox member of the church and I think the composer was of a rationalist frame of mind."
--Yes! Using the words of William Blake, of all people, to justify repression is the height of irony. And what words they are! The grim B&W cinematography is its own reply to the phrase about England's "green and pleasant lands."
"Don’t Sillitoe and Richardson give us a rather teenage Trotskyist view of mid twentieth century England?"
--I suppose that's fair, but what stikes me about the film (which I just saw for the first time last night) is not so much its politics but its basic human sympathy. I want to argue that the movie is saying not so much that a workers' revolution will bring about Utopia, but simply that this is the way the world would have looked and felt to someone like Smith. It makes us care about them and their plight, without necessarily endorsing Smith's outburst about lining "them" all up and shooting them. The helplessness and hopelessness of the Smiths of the world is given a powerful metaphor by the race and its outcome: to lose is to win, and to win is to lose. No way out.