Razor fights in the Summer of Love

IN the 1960's, when director Gillies MacKinnon and his brother Billy were growing up in Glasgow, the city was gripped by "razor gang" fever, with thousands of teenagers clashing in ritualised confrontations every week. Almost 30 years later, the brothers returned to Glasgow to make Small Faces, their story of betrayal and redemption set against the backdrop of the gang warfare, which reached its peak around the time most people think of as the Summer of Love.

"It started around 1963," remembers MacKinnon, who directed and co-wrote the screenplay with his brother. "That's when weapons started appearing - by 1970 it was over. All the sixties influence was there, music and flower power and Czechoslovakia . . . and here in this corner of northern Britain you had this strange situation.

"They had got rid of a lot of the old tenement housing, whole communities had been uprooted and dispersed, and that's when the gangs really came into their own. They would pour into town from all these new housing estates. There were hundreds of these gangs all over Glasgow."

When outsiders think of Glaswegian street violence, they think of the traditional sectarian rivalries of the city, but MacKinnon insists that sectarianism was not particularly important at the time. "There always would be an element of that, but in the big gangs you could be Catholic or Protestant - your loyalty was to the gang.

"A gang would have a specific look. The mods obviously had an influence on the way these guys dressed. Sometimes you would see them adopt this chic, almost effeminate look, wearing coloured scarves and berets, but they'd still be absolutely lethal.

"There was a sense that everything was possible.

"I grew up in a time when, if you were a working class kid and you could pass your exams, you just assumed you had a right to further education. I heard one middle-class English journalist saying about the film that he didn't believe that a boy living in that place would be going to art school - he was absolutely wrong. It was something that was valued - there was no sense of it being sissy or unacceptable."

The director himself went on to art school, and worked as a teacher and cartoonist before making his first short film in the early 1980s.

"If we were going to make a film about youth violence, and kids carrying knives, it was inevitable for us that we had to carry it through. We had to show the excitement of it, but had to show the consequences. It's not a film about hard men and all that crap; it's really a film about innocence. This little boy loses that innocence. He crosses that wasteland into hell and becomes culpable."

With so much media angst expressed these days about dangerous streets and uncontrollable youth, Small Faces demonstrates that, for some at least, cities have always held dangers. "I never felt safe at that time. It's one of these things that always happens when you're a kid, and it still happens today. Teenagers live in a world that we don't know anything about. They won't go down certain streets, and all the rest of it."

But, despite the violence and viciousness, the Glasgow of 30 years ago is portrayed as a much more hopeful place than the junkie culture of 1980s Edinburgh depicted in Trainspotting, with which Small Faces is inevitably compared. "I don't think they're comparable at all. This is not a film about deprivation - these kids had money. But years later, the apprenticeships weren't there any more. You've got unemployment, you've got drugs, so Trainspotting describes a very different time.

There's one key shot in Small Faces, when the young central character, Lex, ventures forth to make contact with the opposing gang, the Tongs. Arriving at the border of "Tongland", Lex is faced with an almost apocalyptic landscape, a sea of mud under a turbulent sky with tower blocks rearing up like medieval fortresses. The image encapsulates the MacKinnon brothers' ambition to escape the restrictions of low-budget, "gritty" urban realism in favour of a more mythic approach." Well, that particular shot was a gift from the weather, with that struggling sky and remarkable light. But you're right - I don't want to get into it too much, but those mythic archetypes were certainly important to us," MacKinnon says. "When Billy's idea about Lex going to Tonglnd came up, I knew we were getting into something very interesting, about the relationship between brothers and the idea of crossing over to the enemy. We wanted to create a sealed world. There's no police, the mother doesn't know what's going on. It's not like we're making a documentary film about Glasgow in the 1960s."

After directing several dramas for the BBC, including the superb, award- winning The Grass Arena, MacKinnon made his cinema debut in Ireland, directing Shane Connaughton's 1950's drama, The Playboys.

HIS second Irish-set film, Trojan Eddie, has its world premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh on Sunday night. From an original script by Billy Roche, Trojan Eddie, starring Stephen Rea and Richard Harris, is a powerful tragedy about love, jealousy and revenge in a Traveller community.

As a Scottish director, does MacKinnon feel any particular attachment to specifically Scottish subjects or settings?

"Obviously, going back to my hometown with my brother is important to me, but there's nothing partisan or flag-waving about it.

"With Trojan Eddie, Billy Roche wrote this fantastic script in a world I knew nothing about, but what he wrote made me want to know about it. That's the best reason to make a film."