Film

The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil

Name: The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil
Genre: Drama, Music, Comedy, History, TV Movie
Released: 1974
Cast: John Bett, Dolina MacLennan, David Maclennan, Elizabeth MacLennan, Alex Norton

Musical

A 1974 theatre piece that rewrites Highland history through anarchic folk performance. A travelling company performs a furious, funny, musical reckoning with Scottish displacement and exploitation—from the Clearances to oil barons. Intercut with filmed scenes, it's part comedy, part documentary, part protest song. Essential viewing for anyone curious how radical art speaks truth.

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Kes1970

A working-class Yorkshire boy finds freedom and dignity through falconry. Like Cheviot, it's about systemic indifference to ordinary lives, told with tenderness and rage, rooted in a specific place and culture.

But The social realism is unsparing and the ending is bleak. There's no comfort here, only clarity.

if....1968

A surreal political allegory about rebellion in an English boarding school. Shares Cheviot's refusal to make power palatable, its anarchic energy, and its belief that theatre and cinema can radicalize.

But It's oblique and formally ambitious. The tone shifts between naturalism and avant-garde without warning, which some find mannered.

Poor Cow1967

Ken Loach's debut follows a working-class London woman navigating poverty and male violence. Like Cheviot, it's cinema as social witness—intimate, unsentimental, furious on behalf of those history ignores.

But The pacing is slow and the story offers no redemption. It's a hard watch about hard lives.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Ballad of Little Jo1993

Both use the frontier/wilderness myth to ask who gets erased from history and how survival demands becoming someone else.

A woman in 1880s Montana passes as a man to survive frontier life. Shares Cheviot's obsession with how performance allows survival under oppression, and how history erases those who don't fit its official story.

But It's a quiet chamber piece about passing and identity, not an action film. The deliberate pace will test your patience.

Culloden1964

Peter Watkins' docudrama reconstructs the 1746 battle as living history, using handheld cameras and period interviews. It shares Cheviot's obsession with how Scotland was colonized, using form itself as argument.

But The grainy, chaotic style can feel dated. Some viewers find the faux-interviews intellectually heavy-handed.

The Grey Fox1982

A Canadian outlaw film that's also a meditation on displacement and historical erasure. It has Cheviot's interest in how the powerful write stories, and how the powerless resist through cunning and performance.

But It's deliberately paced and quiet. Expecting a heist thriller will leave you disappointed.

Land and Freedom1995

Ken Loach's Spanish Civil War film traces idealism through brutal history. It shares Cheviot's passionate engagement with historical injustice and its conviction that cinema should ask viewers to choose sides.

But It's long, politically didactic, and the romantic storyline feels secondary to the argument. Some find that alienating rather than moving.

Shadows1960

John Cassavetes' improvised jazz-like film about race, identity and displacement in America. Like Cheviot, it uses spontaneity and music to talk about who gets to belong, told by people on the margins.

But The plot is thin and the acting style feels raw to the point of distraction. It's closer to a sketch than a narrative.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan1982

A tightly wound space opera about vengeance and the cost of survival. It's thematically distant from Cheviot but shares its theatrical verve and its refusal to let spectacle overwhelm moral seriousness.

But If you're not invested in Star Trek already, the references will feel opaque. It's also very much a product of early-eighties blockbuster thinking.

Get Carter1971

Michael Caine in a brutal Newcastle crime film that's also an elegy for post-industrial Britain. It's Cheviot's contemporary in refusing to look away from how power grinds people down.

But It's gratuitously violent and its attitude to women is genuinely ugly. The style can feel dated in ways that don't serve the story.

Handsworth Songs1986

Both are agitprop art in the fullest sense—using form itself to show that objective 'balance' is a lie, that the colonized must speak for themselves.

John Akomfrah's experimental documentary about the 1985 riots in Birmingham, using archive, poetry, music and found footage. Like Cheviot, it refuses the constraints of conventional journalism to make colonial history and present-day racism inseparable and visible.

But It's formally avant-garde and deliberately difficult. There's no single argument, just layered testimony and montage. Some will find it obscure.