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Julian Upton believes this key film of the British New Wave remains essential.

Startling a sleepy Britain with the roar of a factory floor and the crashing of a dustbin lid, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning grabbed its post-war audience by the collars and shook it into the sixties with sex, bad language and the hard poetry of working class life. In a starring debut as invigorating as a dip in the icy Trent, Albert Finney fuels the film’s angry, insolent and comically mischievous motor with a raw energy previously unseen on the British screen. His Arthur Seaton – a cocky, 21-year-old Nottingham lathe operator – works to live and lives to drink and womanise. On Sundays he fishes in the shadow of the gasworks. Content to carry on a carefree existence railing against conformity and sticking two fingers up at authority, his world is shaken only when the spectre of adult responsibility raises its ugly head.

Based on Alan Sillitoe’s equally coruscating novel, Saturday Night was the film that changed British cinema. Although preceded by Room at the Top and Look Back in Anger, it was this that effectively ushered in the British New Wave that brought Free Cinema talents like Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson further into the mainstream. As good as they were, none quite achieved the explosive mix of ferocity, humour and social realism that director Karel Reisz does here. He had a lot of talent to help him, of course. As well as Finney’s intense performance, there is sterling work by cinematographer Freddie Francis, editor Seth Holt and composer Johnny Dankworth, all of whom contribute to the film’s never-bettered blend of technical distinction and kitchen sink aesthetic.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning may be fifty years old and a capsule of another era, but Arthur Seaton’s relentless insubordination remains timeless. It recently pierced the zeitgeist again when 2006’s band-du-jour, Sheffield’s The Arctic Monkeys, took one of Seaton’s battle cries: ‘Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not’, as the title of their first album. It was a chipper, Seaton-esque poke in the eye for the sniffy critics who had dismissed his rantings as glib and outmoded.

 

Julian Upton on 2nd March 2009
View all 136 of Julian Upton's reviews

The most significant film of the 1960s British new wave in cinema, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was in many ways the most influential of the group, with its power... more >

The most significant film of the 1960s British new wave in cinema, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was in many ways the most influential of the group, with its powerful anti-establishment stance, unblushing treatment of sex and working class protagonist: Arthur Seaton was something new in British cinema. While other films of the period have dated somewhat, most of Reisz’s ground-breaking film looks as fresh and powerful as ever, and it's salutary to observe just how good Albert Finney was in the pivotal role of Seaton, when the actor is now something of an elder statesman of the profession.

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