Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – 1960 | 89 mins | Drama | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Karel Reisz‘s first full length film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was adapted from Alan Sillitoe’s novel set in his native Nottingham. The central character, Arthur Seaton, played in the film by Albert Finney, is a hard drinking, red-blooded, rebellious young factory worker, sowing his seeds in every direction until finally trapped into conformity and marriage on a new housing estate, a fate he resents, hurling a defiant stone at the trim new houses. The film is totally believable, almost spontaneously observed realism, a view of a regional setting in a style never previously revealed. The factories and back streets, canal banks and pubs, in which the action took place, were not studio reproductions, but genuine Nottingham locations, stocked with real live inhabitants who could never be mistaken for fugitives from Central Casting.

Albert Finney in the main part played with a gusto and an instinct which instantly gave the situations a veracity unusual in feature films. Insolent and self-confident, but without the consuming ambition of a Joe Lampton, Arthur Seaton signified the emergence of a new folk hero, the new breed of British working man, combining high wages with a disdain for being told what to do, irresponsible as long as he can get away with it, a creature who has to enjoy his freedom before he loses it to nappies and rent books. Rachel Roberts played the wife of a workmate, made pregnant by the rammish Arthur, and Shirley Ann Field the dull, pretty girl he is eventually ensnared by.

Karel Reisz directed the film with a sureness and modesty which resulted in an accomplished work. In only one sequence, at a fun fair, when two soldiers seek Arthur on the roundabouts and dodgem cars in order to beat him up, does Reisz depart from a four-square camera approach; as a consequence he remained in total control of his material, and this first feature film remains to this date his most satisfying.