Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)

The British New Wave is a tight little group of films, maybe 25 in all, with a tight group of creative personalities involved, and -- I have come to notice -- a tight sense of situation. Of the four films in the cycle I've watched so far -- Room at the Top (also read the John Braine novel), Look Back in Anger (also read the John Osborne play), Billy Liar (planning to read the Keith Waterhouse novel), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (planning to read the Alan Sillitoe novel) -- all are set in cities in the North or Midlands of England, all feature an "angry young man" as protagonist, and in each of them the young man is juggling the affections of at least two women (three, in the case of Billy Liar). By the end of each story he makes a decision about which woman to commit to (except for Billy Liar, who decides not to commit at all).

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was directed by Karel Reisz (who also directed the New Wave film Morgan and produced the film version of David Storey's This Sporting Life), written by Alan Sillitoe (who also wrote The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner), produced by Tony Richardson (who also directed the film versions of Look Back in Anger, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, John Osborne's The Entertainer, and Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey), shot by Freddie Francis (who also shot Room at the Top for director Jack Clayton), and stars Albert Finney (who appeared in the film version of The Entertainer, played Billy Liar on stage, and starred in John Osborne's play Luther directed by Tony Richardson on Broadway). See what I mean about a tight group?

Finney is electric in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, as the actors grabbing these angry young man roles tended to be -- they all spotted the opportunities inherent in the parts, which are very showy even as they are very realistic. Finney's brash factory worker negotiates his way between a married woman played by Rachel Roberts, whom he impregnates, and a single gal played by Shirley Anne Field, whom he ultimately proposes to. There's a great part for Norman Rossington (familiar as The Beatles' manager in A Hard Day's Night) as Finney's pal Bert. Freddie Francis's black and white "lensing" (as Variety might call it) is exact, unlovely, and therefore quite beautiful; not the least of the contributions of these New Wave films is finding the visual poetry in the prose of these grimy towns.