The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

British New Wave

DIRECTOR

Karel Reisz

WRITER

Alan Sillitoe

STARS

Albert Finney, Shirley Anne Field, Rachel Roberts

BEFORE

1947 Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday, a gritty tale set in London’s East End, is a precursor of the British realist dramas.

1959 Look Back in Anger, directed by Tony Richardson and based on a play by John Osborne, is the first British “kitchen sink” drama movie.

AFTER

1965 Starting with his TV docudrama Up the Junction, Ken Loach makes a series of movies mixing working-class drama with documentary.

Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning brought working-class Britain to the screens in a way that had never been seen before. Based on a semiautobiographical novel by Alan Sillitoe, who also wrote the screenplay, the movie focuses on the story of young Arthur, who wants more out of life than a factory job. This was one of the first British movies to focus on the working class not as victims, but as individuals with their own aspirations and frustrations. Reisz was a leader of the British New Wave of filmmakers that paralleled the French New Wave. Both movements aimed for a more authentic approach to filmmaking by venturing out of the studio and into real locations.

British New Wave filmmakers, however, were less concerned with innovative cinematography than their French peers. The realism they sought was in their subject matter: the personal lives of the working class. The first of these “kitchen sink” dramas on film was Look Back in Anger (1959), adapted from John Osborne’s play. It spawned the so-called Angry Young Man movie genre of the 1960s, featuring working-class heroes.

Yet while Look Back in Anger is relatively theatrical, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is matter-of-fact, almost documentary, in its depiction of the troubled lives of its characters. It pulls no punches in its inclusion of adultery, abortion, drunkenness, and violence as everyday realities. Fifty years on, such dramas are the staple of British television soaps, but in 1960 they were new. Arthur, brilliantly portrayed by Albert Finney, is determined not to be diminished by the limitations of life as a lathe operator at a bicycle factory in Nottingham. He rebels against the drudgery of his class.

The poster style was influenced by that of the French movie À bout de souffle, made in the same year.

Bucking expectations

Despite his declaration “That’s what all these loony laws are for, to be broken by blokes like us,” Arthur is neither a political rebel nor a criminal. He simply bucks expectations by having an affair with Brenda (Rachel Roberts), the wife of an older colleague, while two-timing her with young Doreen (Shirley Anne Field). Even this small personal rebellion is brought low by reality when Brenda becomes pregnant and is forced into an abortion, and Arthur is beaten up by Brenda’s husband and his soldier friends. Yet Arthur’s spirit is not crushed, and although harrowing, the film is ultimately uplifting.

Doreen and Arthur meet in secret. While they rebel against their parents, whom they consider “dead from the neck up,” they are not immune to reality when Arthur gets another girl pregnant.

“What I’m out for is a good time—all the rest is propaganda!”

Arthur Seaton / Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Born in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, in 1926, Karel Reisz was sent to Britain when he was 12, just before Nazi Germany invaded his country in 1939. His parents died in Auschwitz. He served in World War II and studied chemistry at Cambridge, then became a film critic. Reisz led the Free Cinema movement, which strived for a less class-bound, more politically aware British cinema, and began to direct his own movies in 1960.

1960 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

1964 Night Must Fall

1981 The French Lieutenant’s Woman

What else to watch: Look Back in Anger (1959) ✵ À bout de souffle (1960) ✵ The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) ✵ Billy Liar (1963) ✵ This Sporting Life (1963) ✵ Alfie (1966) ✵ Kes (1969) ✵ Naked (1993)