Monday: Angry Young Men

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A much more conscious movement was being developed simultaneously by a group of documentarians, film critics, and some of the directors of the original Angry Young Man stage productions. The Free Cinema movement, led by Lindsay Anderson, created short documentary work depicting scenes of British life they felt were ignored by mainstream documentaries. Operating on tiny budgets, they shot handheld footage of working-class teenagers and their hangouts, amusement parks and markets, prostitutes and jazz musicians; and presented the films at a series of screenings at the National Film Theatre. Free Cinema was ultimately a short-lived movement, but it proved to be highly influential and launched Anderson, Tony Richardson, and Karel Reisz into their feature film careers. In the ‘60s, using the Angry Young Man novels and plays as source material, the Free Cinema directors began a radical shift in British filmmaking known as the British New Wave.

The British New Wave films were almost all produced by Woodfall Films, a studio created in 1958 by Tony Richardson and John Osborne to produce the film version of Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger. Because these films were almost entirely adapted from literary works, they are often regarded as somehow less “cinematic” than some other “New Wave” movements, most notably its counterpart across the Channel. This attitude, however, ignores the fascinating tension created by the combination of their theatrical origins with the films’ gritty location shooting. The New Wave continued Free Cinema’s project of capturing marginalized areas of British society on film, breaking free from the staid studio productions of traditional cinema. The grim working-class cities of the North of England and the Midlands had been photographed so little in mainstream productions that they had an exotic appeal to viewers in the ‘60s, turning the New Wave into a kind of travel cinema at times. The Northern accents of the actors were likewise new and shocking. It is often difficult for Americans to understand the importance of accent in denoting class in a country with such a rigid social structure as the UK. As explored explicitly in Room at the Top, accent politics represented a significant social barrier at a time when regional accents were not allowed by policy in public institutions like the BBC. Thus, the boldly working-class heroes of the New Wave were seen as a true challenge to the social establishment.

Though working-class restlessness is perhaps the central theme of the British New Wave, the films typically focus on the characters’ lives outside the workplace. Leisure activities are explored, like the semi-professional rugby in Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life, but by far the most important activity to the New Wave is sex. The films’ direct confrontation with sexual issues was truly groundbreaking. The New Wave directors examined abortion in films like Georgy Girl, homosexuality and biracial relationships in A Taste of Honey, and extramarital sex in just about every one of them, notably in Only Two Can Play and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. At times, the films would seemingly tackle every social issue at once, earning the movement the label of “kitchen sink” drama. As always, however, the trouble in being taboo-breaking pioneers is that once the taboo has been broken, they appear less radical to later audiences. The treatment of social issues in the New Wave may seem tame today, but they remain significant when put in the context of not only traditional British cinema but also Hollywood films of the same period. The New Wave directors did not tiptoe around their subjects using coded language as their American contemporaries did, but instead confronted them directly. The overt political implications of the British films also went well beyond those of most Hollywood productions, explicitly blaming society for the anger of the young working-class, as opposed to citing an inherent delinquency in youth itself.

The British New Wave as a movement did not last long. By the mid-60s, the directors’ interests had expanded to the new youth culture of Swinging London in Darling and Alfie, and also to more middle-class dramas like The Pumpkin Eater and Séance on a Wet Afternoon. However, the realism of the Angry Young Man films and their frank handling of social issues have continued to be a central characteristic of British national cinema, perpetuated by filmmakers like Ken Loach, Ken Russell, and Mike Leigh. Particularly in America, the British New Wave has seen its reputation unfairly diminish over time, criticized for dated messages and for lacking the obvious stylistic innovation of the French New Wave. One viewing of a film like Billy Liar, however, shatters those myths, revealing exactly the romanticism and artistry that we find so appealing in the Nouvelle Vague, as well as a social project as ambitious as that of any cinematic movement. Evan Chung