Playing at times like a Keystone Cops comedy where Buster Keaton just happens to wander in for a gag or two, Riff-Raff follows the off-colour adventures of a young Glaswegian who gets a job on a construction site where they're converting a closed down hospital into luxury apartments. Stevie's fellow workers are a mixed assortment of Liverpudlians, Geordies and West Indians, never short of a good line or two, all of them working on a site where every rule in the book seems to have been forgotten. Meanwhile, Stevie falls for and moves in with Susan, a young Irish singer he meets in a pub. But the shenanigans of the first half of the film give way to a more sombre tone as Stevie discovers Susan's drug habit, and the errant responsibilities of the building site lead to tragedy. Loach details the sad but irrepressible life of his protagonists with a mix of tender satire and bitter outrage, in the process producing one of the best films of his illustrious
career.