First commissioned as a BBC play in 1978, Roy Mintons story of life in a British borstal was considered unsuitable for broadcast by the Corporation and was never shown. Minton and director Alan Clarke remade it as a feature filma cause celebre on its theatrical releaseand when Channel Four came to screen it in 1984, Mary Whitehouse took them to court, an unsuccessful and bloody battle which dragged on for two years.
Set in a borstal (now renamed a Young Offenders Institution), it attempts to examine the coping mechanisms of several trainees, and in the process exposes the appalling brutality of such places with merciless clarity.
Carlin (Winstone, in a terrifying performance, overflowing with anger and violence) is a hard man, fingered by staff and inmates alike as someone to knock into place. At first he keeps his nose clean and accepts beatings and humiliations from the officers and from Banks, the ruling Daddy of the place, with mute and quaking rage. But inevitably Carlin snaps and, in one of modern British cinemas most powerful and unforgettable scenes, he strides into the games room, calmly fills a sock with snooker balls and fells one of Banks side-kicks (Phil Daniels) with a single blow to the head. Within no time, Carlin is the Daddy, coping with the degradation of incarceration in the only way he knows how-through violence.
Archer (Mick Ford) is different. Older and brighter than most trainees, he cocoons himself within spurious vegetarianism, Buddhism and Islam to cause as much grief to his captors as possible. He is the films articulation, asking at one point, How can anyone build a character in a regime based on deprivation?, and survives through holding on to a belief in his own intellectual and emotional superiority over the regime that imprisons him. For Davis (Blundell), ill-equipped to fight or fit in, it is all too much. After being gang-raped, he crumples, incapable of turning to either the powerful Carlin or to the borstals officers for help.
Scums brutality makes it a genuinely harrowing film. The bleak, snow-dusted locations, the featureless interiors of the institution, the perfect casting and magnificent acting of the indifferent and brutal staff make borstal appear to be what can only be described as a living hell. Whether Scum defeats its own object by falling on the wrong side of the exploitation divide is a moot point and open to debate. What is surely not open to debate is that good films should provoke some sort of emotional response and, even after all these years, Scum still hits hard and deep.