18-year-old Joy starts her catalogue of bad choices by running away from home with Tom. When her son goes missing, she briefly comes to grips with what is most important to her.
In the end, the few good moments (as when the girl tends bar, cares for her child and shares confidences with Terence Stamp) are lost in the mess of everything else.
An argument can certainly be made for sex in movies that try to approach seriously the problems of the young; and this one, which begins so frankly with maternity, seems to have become quite nervous about things physical right after the credits came on.
Poor Cow is certainly a gritty portrayal of life on the breadline in the late Sixties, shot in a documentary style, but that does not mean that it is wholly downbeat.
Not even Carol White as Joy, glowing with vitality and beautifully modulating the heroine's different moods, can make of Poor Cow more than a superficial, slightly patronising incursion into the nether realms of social realism.
Despite its scruffy scene and downhill theme, Poor Cow is not really another of England's angry proletarian tragedies. The film tells its story with humanity that is never sentimental and humor that never jokes.
Kenneth Loach uses an improvisatory technique in all this, and it largely works. Thesps were given the gist and trend of the dialog, and permitted to embroider it with their own words.
