MOVIES : Low Budget, High Ideals : Ken Loach makes striking films with politically timely themes on a far-from-Hollywood budget. But can ‘Land and Freedom’ expand his U.S. fan club beyond cinephiles and other directors?

Talk about a director’s director.

Many of the world’s outstanding filmmakers virtually form a line to extol the virtues of Britain’s Ken Loach.

Alan Parker has called Loach’s TV film “Cathy Come Home” “the single most important reason I wanted to become a film director.”

Stephen Frears, recalling his and Loach’s days at the BBC in the 1970s, once said: “There wasn’t anything new you could do, because Ken was already showing it so much better than anyone else.”

When Francis Ford Coppola ran his ill-fated company American Zoetrope, he would frequently send Loach scripts and implore him to practice his craft in the United States.

And the great Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, who died this month after a premature retirement, always insisted that he would return to filmmaking in any capacity if Loach ever wanted to work with him. Loach, he said, was one of the few directors who could make him laugh and cry in a single scene.

Given the extravagance of this praise, one would expect Loach to be feted worldwide, a man who is offered huge budgets to make prestigious movies. Instead he toils in Europe, making the films he wants to make in the way he prefers--on low budgets and without stars.

“I occasionally get scripts sent from America,” he says, stirring a cup of tea next to an editing room where he is cutting his next film, tentatively titled “Carla’s Song.” “But it’s a different way of working, with all sorts of implications I don’t like.

“For me, part of the trick is keeping the scale of a film appropriate. And if you also make it European, then you have freedom in casting. Casting’s crucial to me, and if a film’s unbalanced by the presence of one of a group of so-called international stars--well, you might as well forget the film.

“And there’s another thing. I can’t think of a single European director who’s gone over [to Hollywood] and done better work than they did in Europe.”

If these sound like fighting words, they are delivered almost meekly. Loach, who turns 60 this year, is a mild-mannered man with a nervous, self-effacing smile, who talks about himself modestly in a voice barely rising above a whisper.

But don’t be fooled. For three decades now he has made films packing enormous bite and punch--not to mention stern, uncompromising political messages. A man of the left, Loach has often favored stories that apply a Marxist analysis to societal problems such as homelessness and unemployment.

As a result, Loach tends to be revered in countries he calls “politically more articulate”--France and elsewhere in Europe--and marginalized both in the United States and his native Britain.

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“Land and Freedom,” which opened Friday in Los Angeles, is a perfect case in point. Set in the 1930s, it is about David, a young, unemployed man from Liverpool (played by Ian Hart, who portrayed John Lennon in “BackBeat”) who goes off to the Spanish Civil War, joining with republican forces in their doomed attempt to resist Franco’s fascists.

David experiences trench warfare and has a passionate affair with an idealistic young Spanish woman (Rosana Pastor). But politics is at the root of the story--Loach is absorbed by how various leftist factions within the republican ranks fell out and betrayed one another. In this instance, members of the revolutionary socialist militia whom David has befriended fall foul of the Stalinists who come to dominate the republican side. The key scene in “Land and Freedom” is a political debate about whether to collectivize the land in a village newly liberated by the republicans.

“Land and Freedom” is less daunting than all this sounds--but it clearly demands an intelligent audience or, to use Loach’s phrase, a “politically articulate” one.

“In countries like France, Spain and Italy,” he notes, “you can go to small towns and have a much more interesting conversation about film [than in the United States or Britain]. People there are excited by ideas. There’s no stigma to discussing them.”

Reaction to the film has been polarized so far. Last year it won the special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival, where Loach was greeted by adoring crowds. It has been warmly received in France and especially in Spain, where young audiences flocked to see an examination of the issues that absorbed their grandparents some 60 years ago. Yet in Britain, “Land and Freedom” received only a limited release and did mediocre business; he worries that the same fate awaits it in the United States.

“There’s no attempt to find an audience,” he says of the way his films are distributed and exhibited in the States. “We’ve had various distributors in the U.S., and this time we’re with Gramercy, who have been very nice and hospitable. In general, though, I find American distributors will send a big limousine for you but won’t engage in a strategy for finding an audience.”

So who does he think his audience is?

“Well, around universities, I’d have thought,” Loach says. “People who read the inside pages of newspapers, I guess. Even people who read the front pages of broadsheets.” He lowers his gaze. “I don’t know, it’s hard to say more without sounding vain.”

But if the subject matter of the film seems daunting, why would he recommend anyone going?

“To be stimulated and excited by the story, I would hope,” he says. “It’s not a difficult or complex film. It’s about young people from all over the world who had ideals they thought were worth fighting for--a loathing of fascism and the extreme right. The Spanish Civil War, remember, was the first war against fascism.”

Yet is that relevant for American audiences in 1996?

“Oh, I think people are troubled by the rise of the far right in the U.S. just like everywhere,” Loach says in his deceptively mild voice. “The far right’s on the march again but dressed in different clothes. It won’t present itself now in jackboots and swastikas--but nevertheless it finds scapegoats in society on racial grounds, and it tries to reduce the welfare gains made by working-class people in the interests of making capitalism more profitable.”

Given his political agenda it’s no surprise that Loach’s film style is gritty and frequently strives for a quasi-documentary naturalism. He has littered his casts with nonactors in the past, sometimes with spectacular success. He recruited Crissy Rock, a part-time stand-up comic with no acting experience, to play the lead role in his “Ladybird, Ladybird” as an abused working-class woman whose six children are taken away from her by social workers who feared she was an irresponsible mother. He coaxed such a startling, unsettling performance from Rock that she won the best actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1994.

“The lead parts in ‘Land and Freedom’ are played by actors, but the militia are not,” Loach says. “With nonactors, I try to find people who have a common denominator with the character they’re playing to take them through the experience.”

He also imposed a raw, almost improvised style on the film by not letting his cast see the entire script ahead of time but feeding them a couple of pages at a time. This approach bore fruit when one character in Spain dies in shocking circumstances; the horror and surprise on the faces of the others look remarkably authentic.

“It means the cast play scenes with every possibility open,” Loach observes. “I don’t like it when an actor reads a script beforehand and plays each scene knowing the outcome of the story, thus closing his mind to possibilities. It’s more interesting to see a performance in which everything’s open and yet to be decided. The hardest thing to act is shock and surprise. In a scene where something shocking happens, the best thing is to film the surprise. So this was a way to work, for the actors as well as with them.”

He first developed such techniques in the 1960s, when he was among a coterie of radical directors working for BBC Television. Loach sprang to fame in Britain with “Cathy Come Home,” a TV film with a protagonist similar to that of “Ladybird, Ladybird.” Cathy was a single mother whose children are taken from her by social workers--after she becomes homeless. “Cathy Come Home” was a national event, feelings about the story ran so high. Parliament framed new legislation about homeless people’s rights.

Loach made two feature films in the late 1960s, “Poor Cow” and “Kes,” which were highly regarded, and continued to work at the BBC during the 1970s. But his leftist views seemed out of sync with the Margaret Thatcher era in the 1980s, and he struggled to find work.

Loach made a TV documentary about striking British steelworkers in 1980 that was deemed too biased and was never shown. Then another TV documentary, which showed striking miners being beaten by British policemen, was also shelved. At one point he was reduced to making a couple of TV commercials just to survive.

Yet the 1990s have seen a revival in his career, and several of his feature films--”Hidden Agenda,” “Riff-Raff,” “Raining Stones,” “Ladybird, Ladybird” and now “Land and Freedom”--have received awards at European film festivals while being praised to the skies by European critics.

“They all made money,” Loach says. “Of course, they’re all scaled sensibly. ‘Land and Freedom’ cost about 2.5 million pounds [$3.8 million], with money from Spain, Germany and Britain and a presale to France. You can really live quite comfortably making films like this, you know--as long as you don’t have a ludicrous lifestyle. I’m in a position where I’m getting to make the next film I want.”

That next film, “Carla’s Song,” sounds like vintage Loach. It’s about a bus conductor in Glasgow, Scotland, who gets involved with a young Nicaraguan woman, a refugee from her own country. It’s set in the 1980s, at the time the Sandinistas were active in Nicaragua.

It certainly has the ring of another project that will keep Loach firmly removed from conventional filmmaking in Hollywood, or indeed anywhere else in the United States. He agrees with a rueful smile.

“I wouldn’t mind making a film in the States if all the conditions were right,” he says. “I mean, as a country, it’s a very interesting location.

“And there’s quite a range of filmmaking. John Sayles tackles some intriguing subjects. And there’s the Coen brothers--they’re quite different again. But to be honest,” and Loach smiles his shy little smile again, “there’s no one there in aesthetic terms to whom I feel a kindred spirit.”