saturday night sunday morning alan sillitoe

Not only does this approach make the action more realistic, but it helps to convey the message of the film. His camera is always an observer, sitting passively in the corner it never flinches or mitigates, and it makes no apologies for what occurs on screen. Reisz' background in documentary filmmaking makes him a naturally understated director. But well before the latter entered production, Anderson's colleague Karel Reisz was blazing the cinematic trail with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.īased upon the novel by Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a rich and respectful work which depicts the life of the working man in Nottingham in a completely uncompromising way. In time the genre, with its left-wing undercurrents and subtle emphasis on counter-culture, would come to be epitomised by Lindsay Anderson, the director of If.

It would take something truly momentous to shake cinema out of this stupor: that something was the British New Wave.īeginning with John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, the New Wave sought to reinvigorate film and theatre, tackling controversial subjects head on and presenting a view of the working classes which was the very opposite of patronising or parochial. With Alfred Hitchcock now permanently based in America and Powell and Pressburger past their prime, cinema became increasingly populated by American melodramas, jingoistic war films and ropey comedies. In the immediate post-war period, British cinema lost a lot of the sparkle and sense of adventure which it had previously embodied.

Saturday night sunday morning alan sillitoe