NEW WAVE BRIT PACK
Film Forum celebrates UK cinema from the ’50s & ’60s
THE lives and loves of the British working class, central to the plays of John Osborne (“The Entertainer”), inspired a cycle of so-called “kitchen sink” dramas. Not only did those films make stars out of Richard Burton and Albert Finney, they changed British cinema — a time celebrated in the Film Forum’s twoweek festival, “The Brit New Wave: From Angry Young Men to Swinging London.”
“Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” “This Sporting Life” and “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” focused on the alienated youth of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Many were filmed by Woodfall Film Productions, the company Osborne, director Tony Richardson and producer Harry Saltzman founded in 1959. Their first release, “Look Back in Anger,” was an adaptation of Osborne’s play about Jimmy Porter (Burton), a festering pile of working-class angst who plays trumpet in jazz clubs and snarls his way through an unhappy marriage.
“‘Look Back in Anger’ was a huge break in what films were about,” says Steven Hess, Woodfall’s self-described “accidental curator” (he’s Richardson’s son-in-law).
“These [New Wave] films focused on a way of life in Britain that had been brushed under the rug. Woodfall and Tony got under the skin of what the cultural and political and social aspects of living in Northern England were.”
The films were not only innovative in terms of subject matter and cinematography; they also gave rise to a new generation of actors who “were developing their skills and . . . were given a stage to do it on,” says Hess. Some benefited from the UK’s Education Act of 1944, which made it financially possible for working-class actors such as Tom Courtenay (“The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”) to attend drama school. “It made it easier for workingclass boys to get a decent education,” says Courtenay, who co-starred with Finney many years later in “The Dresser.” Based on the Alan Sillitoe short story, 1962’s “Long Distance Runner” tells the story of Colin Smith, a rebellious youth sentenced to a borstal, or reform school, for robbing a bakery. Directed by Richardson, it was Courtenay’s first major role in a film.
“Tony was very clever with me, always encouraging me to be myself, even though I was not at all like Colin Smith,” Courtenay says. “I hardly ever had to do more than one take. I think he liked the rawness that I had — not much technique.”
Drama critic John Lahr considers 1960’s “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” the finest film of the British New Wave. It was directed by Lahr’s friend Karel Reisz and starred Finney as a Raleigh Bicycle Company worker involved with two women — one of them married.
“It’s a work of art,” says Lahr. “It’s really well made. It’s the first depiction without judgment of how working-class people lived. It’s not a Nöel Coward depiction of the happy, larking working class. It has a vivid sense of verisimilitude and Albert Finney’s first great performance. He was the embodiment of this new angry young man. That was the sound, the rumble of the new generation.”