The Bitter Ash

The Bitter Ash is a Canadian drama film, directed by Larry Kent and released in 1963.^[1] One of the first narrative feature films ever shot in Vancouver,^[2] the film stars Alan Scarfe as Des, an unhappy blue collar man who is drawn into the city's counterculture underground, where he clashes with bohemian intellectual Colin (Philip Brown) over the affections of Colin's wife Laurie (Lynn Stewart).

The film was controversial at the time because it depicted sexual activity, brief nudity, profanity and drug use.^[3] Unable to secure commercial distribution, Kent exhibited the film by personally undertaking a cross-Canada tour to screen it on university campuses.^[4] The film has often been characterized by critics as an exploitation film, but Kent himself disputed this characterization on the grounds that it didn't have enough sex in it.^[5] The Globe and Mail also later wrote that "the story of the collision of bohemian and working-class values in provincial, precountercultural Vancouver, today seems less striking for its formerly transgressive content - sex, extramarital pregnancy, pot-smoking and nudity - than for its fiercely expressed attitude of utter socioeconomic despair."^[3]