Directed by Karel Reisz • 1960 • United Kingdom
Starring Albert Finney, Shirley Anne Field, Rachel Roberts
Adapted by Alan Sillitoe from his own influential debut novel, this quintessential kitchen-sink drama was one of the first films to give voice to the discontent of Britain’s working class. Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney in his breakthrough performance) is a twenty-two-year-old factory worker in Nottingham, a sprawling industrial city in the British Midlands. All week long he works hard at his lathe, asking and expecting nothing more than his weekly pay; but on Saturday evenings he asserts his independence by losing himself in drinking, brawling, and womanizing. When Brenda (Rachel Roberts), the wife of a coworker, becomes pregnant by Arthur, he begins to face the consequence of his reckless, devil-may-care ways.
Directed by Tony Richardson • 1960 • United Kingdom
Starring Laurence Olivier, Brenda de Banzie, Roger Livesey
“Life is a beastly mess,” states the great Laurence Olivier in this superb drama of the seedy music-hall life. He plays Archie Rice, a third-rate vaudevillian whose song-and-dance ro...
Directed by Tony Richardson • 1961 • United Kingdom
Starring Rita Tushingham, Murray Melvin, Paul Danquah
The revolutionary British New Wave films of the early 1960s were celebrated for their uncompromising depictions of working-class lives and relations between the sexes. Directed by Tony Richa...
Directed by Bryan Forbes • 1962 • United Kingdom
Starring Leslie Caron, Tom Bell, Brock Peters
Left pregnant following a meaningless weekend affair, Jane Fosset (an Oscar-nominated Leslie Caron) moves to a squalid L-shaped room in a crumbling boarding house in the seamier section of London. Ther...
