Warrendale

TAKE ONE, June-Sept, 2004 by Christine Ramsay

1967 110m producer and director Allan King, cinematographer William Brayne, editor Peter Moseley

Warrendale is a documentary snapshot of a Toronto home for disturbed youth. Commissioned for television by the CBC, the film was never broadcast, largely because of its coarse language and unusual nonjudgmental style. However, as Seth Feldman suggests in Allan King: Filmmaker, Warrendale quickly became a cause celebre when it was released theatrically in 1967, not because King was voyeuristically exploiting his subject but because he was rendering it with such a rare combination of sensitivity and intelligence, quiet intimacy and bold aesthetic innovation. In fact, Warrendale showed us things most polite Canadians preferred to ignore--images of emotionally tormented adolescents raging against their social workers and themselves. King called Warrendale an actuality drama--"a shaping of spontaneous action into dramatic form to explore personal and social experience"--and the film arguably remains his masterpiece. With Warrendale, virtually overnight, King became Canada's first internationally recognized auteur, and after its screening at Cannes, the French master Jean Renoir called it the work of a "great artist."

AWARDS: Canadian Film Awards--Film of the Year, Best Feature Film, Direction; Cannes--International Critics Prize; National Society of Film Critics--Special Award; AV Trust--Masterwork