New wave, old problem
Between 1959 and 1963, four young documentary film-makers managed to break into the closed shop of the British film industry. Tony Richardson hurled the first brick. After a successful run of directing plays at the Royal Court Theatre, Richardson had become more interested in making movies and, with John Osborne, formed a company called Woodfall to bring Look Back in Anger to the screen. The British film industry cold-shouldered the project, but Warner Brothers put up the money when Richard Burton agreed to play Jimmy Porter.
A year later, with Woodfall firmly established, Richardson produced Karel Reisz's first feature, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; and in 1962 he produced and directed The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Alan Sillitoe adapted the first from his own novel, the second from his own short story, and in each case its young protagonist announces in an introductory voiceover that he is in rebellion against conformism and/or the middle-class status quo. Both contain revelatory performances, by Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay respectively; and both, like other key movies of the British "New Wave" of the 1960s, are set in the bleak, industrial north.
But partly due to the style of their directors, partly to the contrast in temperament of their protagonists, they are very different films. Although outspokenly rebellious, Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night is determined, against formidable odds (a factory worker's pay), to enjoy himself. In the end, after an affair with a married woman (Rachel Roberts) that ends bitterly, he decides to marry a pretty younger girl (Shirley Anne Field) more conventional than himself. He promises her (and himself) that it is not a sign of "giving in", but as they walk along a muddy wasteland above the town that passes for country, their chances of happiness seem at best 50/50.
Colin Smith in The Long Distance Runner is a few years younger than the gregarious Arthur, more introspective and a loner. Sent to Borstal for petty theft, he pretends to go along with the governor's ideas about "reformation" - summarised in his complacent lip service to mens sana in corpore sano, which means training Colin to win the long-distance race in a competition between Borstal and a public school. The final shot is a freeze-frame of Colin, more alone than ever, after his brave yet totally negative act of rebellion: throwing the race he could have won.
While Arthur defies conformism in general, Colin is more aware of class barriers, with the governor (Michael Redgrave) and his associates personifying the establishment. Both protagonists are from working- class families, Seaton's outwardly and inwardly drab, Smith's dominated by a ruthlessly selfish mother. Yet it is Colin who is the more psychologically wounded. Unlike Arthur, he is sexually timid; his jaunt to the seaside with a girlfriend consists mainly of playing hide and seek among the dunes, and he seems to find more release as a solitary runner.
In contrast, Arthur's affair is treated with directness, and with none of the usual cliched heavy breathing in the buff. The lovers enjoy each other with an unselfconscious mixture of lust and affection; and by proving to be the exception to a comment made by Diana Dors in the 1950s - "I don't think British directors as a whole know quite what to do with sex" - Karel Reisz illustrates its truth. His subtly distanced but exact feeling for characters and atmosphere provides a perfect frame for Finney's confrontational performance, with its abrupt mood swings from anarchic humor to dangerous surliness to seventh heaven.
The Long Distance Runner, like all Richardson's best movies, is edgy, vivid, and sometimes wilfully fragmented (the downside of his often brilliant hit-and-run, hand-held approach). It is full of poetic moments - especially the location scenes showing Colin's practice runs through a wintry forest - and of -powerfully ironic ones, such as the cutting between the Borstal boys obliged to sing Jerusalem at a school concert and an escaped boy being caught and brutalised by police.
Two other major films of the period share the same concern for presenting, in Reisz's words, "people and events that had not been seen on the British screen" (widely seen on UK screens in those years were Sink the Bismarck!, Doctor in Love and Expresso Bongo). John Schlesinger's A Kind of Loving (1960) introduced another uniquely talented young actor, Alan Bates, whose Vic Brown gets his girlfriend pregnant and does "the right thing" by marrying her. They will try their best to make it work, but, like the couple in Saturday Night, their chances are no more than 50/50. Vic is not a rebel, just an ordinary, alienated, working-class bloke in another industrial northern town, and Schlesinger's first feature, like the best of his later work, focused on what he once described as "human difficulties and the illusions of love".
The protagonist of Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963, produced by Reisz) is yet another working-class outsider, this time alienated from himself as well as from the world. Unlike Anderson's later British movies, pungent state-of-the-nation satires, it is a darkly passionate account of the relationship between a lonely, inarticulate rugby league player (Richard Harris) and an embittered widow (Rachel Roberts again). The lovers have difficulty in expressing their feelings as well as in trusting each other, and their affair, even more intensely than in the novel, seems doomed from the start. Once again we are in the rainy, industrial north, with its mean streets, melancholy rooms and noisy pubs. This time it is the rugby team's rich owner who personifies "them".
Impatience with middle-class Britain and its indifference to social change was, however, not enough to create a durable movement. By 1970 Richardson had relocated to Los Angeles, Reisz and Schlesinger were dividing their time between America and Britain, and only Anderson continued to fight on home ground.
The British film industry's refusal to finance Look Back in Anger was an early sign that newcomers were unwelcome. Anderson's If... and O Lucky Man!, Richardson's Tom Jones, Schlesinger's Far From the Madding Crowd and Sunday Bloody Sunday were all funded by American companies. In France, on the other hand, when Chabrol's The Cousins, Godard's Breathless and Truffaut's The 400 Blows appeared in 1959, they were financed by a more flexible industry, whose independent producers continued to back all three directors, and who themselves were partly financed by government subvention.
The French "New Wave" was the real thing. It created a climate in which a more freely personal, intimate style of film-making became commercially possible, and it was welcomed by an older generation, with Jean Cocteau, Jean-Pierre Melville and Eric Rohmer coming forward as godfathers. Although prolific output is not always a virtue, it is a measure of national support. While Anderson's career takes in seven movies, Reisz's nine, Schlesinger's 17 and Richardson's 20, Truffaut made 21 films before a brain tumour cut his life short at 52, Godard has made over 30, Chabrol over 40. Furthermore, unlike their British counterparts, they seldom needed to work for hire, and hardly ever outside France.
In the early 1960s, Jacques Demy, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette and Agnes Varda were also riding the wave. By 1973, when Godard's jealousy of Truffaut led him to announce in an interview that "François has no idea how to make films", after which Truffaut never spoke to him again, the legacy was substantial.
Unlike Godard, the others had not run out of steam, and today, their most gifted successors - Andre Techine, François Ozon and Raul Ruiz - continue to find backing for their projects. Government financing, producers willing to take modestly budgeted risks, and co-productions with other EU countries give them a huge advantage over their British counterparts. Here, the likes of Terence Davies, Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach must contend with a dearth of producers willing to take a French lesson, and a tradition of sporadic government support for the national cinema.
Working for hire in Hollywood, Frears only occasionally gains the freedom to make a movie as good as The Grifters, and at home finds it increasingly difficult to set up more personal projects such as The Snapper. The other three are creative loners who reject the mainstream and survive on frugal budgets.
Loach is perhaps the most direct link to the past. It was Richardson who helped him secure (American) finance for one of his early films, Kes, and Loach sees himself as developing and politicising what Saturday Night and the others started - the use of "the working class as a location". But under present conditions he feels lucky to be able to carry on working, and, ironically, it is only thanks to his popularity in Europe that he succeeds.
· Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner are re-released on October 11.