Before the opening credits, two paramedics climb stairs to a flat (later we learn it's in Liverpool) where an old man, Dave Carr, has been found unresponsive by his granddaughter. Dave dies in the ambulance and his granddaughter cries out, "I've lost him!" We next see her going through some old newspapers, broadsheets, and handbills that tell us that Dave was a proud member of the Labour Party. Looking around, she notices an old leather suitcase atop a wardrobe. Inside she finds more old clippings, a photo of a young woman, and a red kerchief containing a few handfuls of earth. Puzzled, she takes some of it in her hand, then smells her fingers a little disgustedly. The credits begin with titles outlining the historical background of the war, how a military revolt in Spanish Morocco led by General Franco spread into Spain with the backing of landowners and industrialists, committed solely to the overthrow of a democratically elected leftist government. Also throwing their weight behind the Spanish fascists were both Mussolini and Hitler, while Stalin was - so one might think - on the side of the Republic.
Ken Loach has always been a kind of cinema pamphleteer, addressing subjects concerned with the living conditions of the working class, always critical of political actions that have, over the decades, deliberately worsened them.
Loach's style is rather the opposite of epic. He depicts huge social issues involving multitudes of people from the perspective of a few, or even just one. Land and Freedom wasn't the first time that Loach sought to tackle historical subjects: Days of Hope (1975), dealt with events from World War I, and the later The Wind That Shakes the Barley was about the Irish Civil War. I fully understand Loach's wish to tell the story of the war, but I didn't find it necessary for him to tell the whole story. Kim, Dave Carr's granddaughter, reads the letters he wrote from Spain to his sweetheart, and they supply the framework for the film. Dave had been a member of the British Labour Party and his attendance of a speech given by a young Spaniard about the war is what inspires him to join an international brigade and fight for rhe Republican side.
But, possibly attempting to get the story straight, Land and Freedom gets bogged down in didacticism, with lengthy scenes in which the action stops so that characters can conduct political debates. At the center of the film, right after the capture of a village held by fascists by the militia is a scene in which the militia members, Spaniards, German and Scots volunteers, an American (who is far too pragmatic, and becomes something of a villain), and Dave engage in passionate debate over whether or not the village should be collectivized. It's the worst kind of sloganeering that communism was always notorious for, and that had, historically, turned so many away from it. (E.E. Cummings famously described the USSR as "the vicariously childlike kingdom of slogan.")
I found Land and Freedom disappointing because, unlike Loach's best films, he uses his protagonist as a cipher in order to provide us with an undogmatic account of the Spanish "Revolution" (a puzzling use of the term, since the government of the Republic arrived in power through an election, not a revolution). Dave Carr witnesses the victory of fascism and goes home to Liverpool. By the time of his death, he is estranged from his wife and lives alone in a tenement. How much more interesting it might have been if Loach had told us the story of Dave's life in England after witnessing what the working classes accomplished, albeit fleetingly, in Spain. What did he remember or regret from those days of amazement, when formerly abstract principles were put into practice and a society of free and equal human beings was realized? He must have grown disillusioned, especially after 1945. Yet he hung onto his mementos of Spain all those years.
At the end of his time in Spain, after the death of Blanca, a woman with whom he had fallen in love, and after headlines of the fascist bombing of Guernica, Dave sees the futility of the struggle, with communists fighting anarchists fighting Trotskists, and he tears his Communist Party papers into tiny shreds and goes back over the border from Barcelona, the only city still held by the Republic. But not before Blanca is buried by her POUM campañeros. Dave takes her red kerchief and fills it with a handful of earth and goes home to bloody old Britain. But Loach cuts from Blanca's interment to Dave's in Liverpool, where his daughter opens the kerchief and adds the Spanish earth to his grave, reads a few lines from a William Morris poem, and raises her fist in the communist salute. I half expected her to sing the words from the "Internazionale" - the old revolutionary hymn. But where would she have learned it?
There is one angle from which to view Land and Freedom that makes it acutely relevant and timely - because of the war in Ukraine. Currently, more than 20,000 fighters from 52 countries are fighting alongside Ukrainian soldiers, helping them to repel Putin and his war of aggression on an independent democratic state. Along with these heroic volunteers, the democracies of the European Union and of North America are supporting the Ukrainian side with proclamations and arms. Although 40,000 foreigners fought on the Republican side in Spain, they fought with antiquated arms and with no air force. Franco, on the other hand, had the logistical support of the Third Reich. Now China is reportedly going to supply arms to Russia, while warning the West not to return the world to the Cold War. This time, the war is far from cold, and if China wants to engage in proxy warfare, they had better reconsider the fitness of their proxy warriors.
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