lasttimeisaw On paper, Arthur Seaton (Finney) seems to be the trans-Atlantic cousin of James Dean's Jim Stark in Nocholas Ray's REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, he is a disgruntled Nottingham youth slogs away in the lathe unit on week-days, and finds solace in petticoat company in after-work hours (especially the slot which the movie's title indicates), but essentially his life is stuck in a rut, aimless, monotonous and painfully prosaic, but he has to abide by. British New Wave pioneer Karel Reisz's debut feature, a working-class kitchen-sink melodrama headlined by an exuberant 23-year-old Albert Finney in his very first star-making leading role. Arthur partakes in a love affair with Brenda (Roberts), the wife of his co-worker Jack (Pringle), there is no compunction in their way since Brenda believes what they have is love, but, for Arthur, one might think it is the thrill of their trysts keeps him hooked, because apparently this is the only exciting happening amongst the quotidian drabness.Then, he meets Doreen (Field), a comely beauty, seems a shade prim and proper, but she is available, maybe, even a marriage material for him. Arthur ambidextrously seesaws between adultery and romantic courtship, and rests assured that there would be no moral agony and ulterior motive behind, not like George Stevens' A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951), there is no social climbing or great fortune at stake. Plus, Arthur is a self-acclaimed, superb liar, he is cocksure that nothing can take him down, even when Brenda tells him she is pregnant with his child. Alan Sillitoe's script supplies the narrative with very realistic spins and trenchant attitudes, not at all consciously righteous, but they are an encapsulation of its times, the pervading ennui which in retrospect devours an entire youth generation in UK's industrialized era. Arthur would be sucker-punched for sleeping with another man's wife, but is he rueful afterwards? He can take a beat once in a while, a burly lad like that, but he will never change who he is, a good- looking reprobate has nothing to lose and nothing to hold dear, not even Doreen, she is too simple- minded to see through his macho charisma or maybe she is just a sucker for the sort. They will get married, as the film implies in the end, but felicity will plausibly keep eluding them. That's what a first-viewing of this picture feels smarting, as impressively effervescent as Finney's first-grade performance is, eventually the film comes off as a rather unfulfilled downer, our sympathy towards Arthur dissipates easily and emotional distance looms large. On the subject of the supporting cast, Shirley Anne Field is well-chosen in magnifying Doreen's glacial front against her pedestrian persona; Bryan Pringle contrives an understated but greatly ambivalent facade as the cuckolded husband. And Rachel Roberts is outstanding in a role diametrically dissimilar from another British New Wave hallmark she stars, Lindsay Anderson's THIS SPORTING LIFE (1963), it is not that often audience would give a free pass to an adulteress, but here, she imprints both body and soul of an entrapped woman who neither minces words about what she wants nor overstays her welcome when she feels that a closure is inevitable. While on the technical level, Karel Reisz's debut rams home the intimacy between his characters and their environs, a well-presented correlation between its sharp Black-and-White cinematography and its visual spectacle, it doesn't transpire to be a killing character study which can offer us something stimulating to chew on, other than its astute discernment of the acclimated torpor, which is so un-cinematically dispiriting.

Bill Slocum Meeting an attractive young woman in a bar, Arthur Seaton wastes no time making his play. He asks her name, and is told with some embarrassment it's Doreen. She doesn't like her name. He doesn't like his, either."Neither of 'em's up to much, but it ain't our fault," he tells her. Like everything else in his unhappy life, it's all a matter of inheritance.Arthur may share a name with a heroic English king, but he's not one to wear his lower-middle-class crown agreeably. He drinks away his wages, lashes out at defenseless women, and lies with discomfiting ease. But Albert Finney and the filmmakers make sure you care about him anyway.As Seaton, Finney glowers a lot in the way you expect from a protagonist in a kitchen-sink drama, a celebrated product of British New Wave cinema. But the film plays with your expectations just as life does his. He doesn't want to settle for life as he finds it, and while "Saturday Night And Sunday Morning," Alan Sillitoe's adaptation of his own novel directed by Karel Reisz, spits a lot in the direction of conformity, it belies its angry-young-man pedigree with a sense of cosmic acceptance at taking what life has to offer.Seaton's a "madhead," make no mistake. But he's not an especially honest one. He lies impulsively, often to no purpose, and is even proud of it. "I always was a liar, a good one and all," he tells the married woman he sleeps with, Brenda (Rachel Roberts). Ironically, it's his one honest moment on her behalf that lands him in real trouble.The film gives us other hints Seaton is not an admirable figure, like shooting an annoying neighbor with an air rifle in a manner that comes off more creepy than defiant. A "working-class anti-hero," as other reviewers put it, and the real craft in both the direction and in Finney's performance is how it accomplishes the balancing act of establishing Seaton as both miserable company and a rooting interest.It's a well-structured film, too, a quick 90 minutes that breaks neatly into thirty minutes of establishing the situation, thirty minutes of developing a crisis (Seaton stringing along two women, one pregnant), and thirty minutes of tense resolution. At the same time, Reisz gives his film a grimy authenticity that feels real, never stagy, with scenes that have a real lived-in quality while serving the larger story."Saturday Night And Sunday Morning" is a bleak film in many ways, not pleasant to watch. Laughs and insights are minimal, and Finney downplays his considerable screen charm. There are hardly any toothy grins like he'd bestow on his later breakout role, as the title character in "Tom Jones." The handling of his relationship with Doreen is a trifle pat, and too-simply resolved. So is the issue of his relationship with Brenda, although Finney shares a good final scene with her character's husband, played effectively by Stephen Fry lookalike Bryan Pringle.There are a lot of good performances in this film, which blend together to create an effective if routine story. If it's not what you expect from angry-young-man cinema, it's nice to have your expectations batted down now and then.

bkoganbing Albert Finney gives a breakout performance in Saturday Night And Sunday Morning which launched him into stardom. But as for Great Britain's angry young men I much prefer Richard Burton in Look Back In Anger. But I will say it is certainly a tribute to Finney as an actor and to his charisma that he kept the audiences interested in such a lout of a character that he portrayed.Burton's Jimmy Porter was a lout himself, but someone capable of looking at the wider world and caring about it. His best scene in Look Back In Anger was him standing up to the market supervisor on behalf of an Indian merchant who was being discriminated against.But our protagonist Arthur Seaton could give less of an atom of human waste product about the wider world. He's stuck in a dull factory job and takes it out on the world. He lives only for the weekend when he's out carousing with his mates at the local pub and carousing with Rachel Roberts who is married to one of his supervisors at the job.Things change a bit when Finney meets up with Shirley Anne Field who's a pretty young thing and doesn't have an inconvenient husband around. He's keeping them both, but then Roberts gets inconveniently pregnant by Finney.There's some indication in the end that Finney might readjust his attitude on life in general and the opposite sex in particular under the tutelage of Field. Still I really haven't much hope for him.Rachel Roberts turns in a fine performance as a woman used and abused by a truly sexy lout of a man. And Finney despite the repellent nature of his character will keep you glued to the big screen or small.

David Allen Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (1960) starring Albert Finney, Shirley Anne Field, Rachel Roberts, and Norman Rossington is a marvelous, compelling movie based on a story by Alan Sillitoe, who also wrote The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner which became a wonderful movie in 1962 starring Tom Courtenay (see my separate review for that film).The film is a portrait of young factory worker Arthur Seaton still living at home with his parents, and working as a lathe machinist making machined metal parts for industrial use, and doing it faster and better than most other workers in the grim and gray factory where he works, an open expanse where hundreds of workers tend hundreds of work stations under a high roof in dirty and depressing circumstances.Albert Finney plays the role of "Arthur Seaton" brilliantly, and this movie made him a star and led to Tom Jones (1963) also starring Albert Finney, made in color, done on a big budget, and filled with production values....but also about a young man who insists on being independent and refusing to cave into demands and expectations made by inferior people who surround and supervise him. He doesn't care about his reputation, and seems to emerge from the many fights and altercations he is faced with victoriously.Set backs he endures are minor. Victories he achieves seem major.Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (1960) is about a young man led and guided by an inner force which makes him a winner, in spite of lack of mentoring, money, social position, parental support or guidance, and the mediocre opportunities and people part of his dreary world.He wants to do better than those around him, and he does.Viewers watch his progress, come to like him immediately (Albert Finney has the most infectious grin I've ever seen in the movies....the same grin shines through in Miller's Crossing [1990], a movie he stared in 30 years later where he plays a crime boss of Irish descent in America.) The movie begins with scenes showing his successful adulterous sexual relationship with "Brenda," the wife (played well by Rachel Roberts) of Finney's straitlaced boss at work.As the story continues, it shows the problems which result from that, then Finney's abandonment of that girl, and finally his connection with an unusually pretty, thoughtful, reliable, attentive young girl named "Doreen" (played well by Shirley Anne Field) to whom he becomes engaged and plans to marry at the movie's end.In a curious way, the movie has the same "feel good ending" which "B" cowboy movies were famous for in which the hero rides off into the sunset after having set wrong things right for grateful Westerners.Alan Sillitoe is a truly great and thoughtful writer who recognized the inner strength and potential of noble young men born to low circumstances, but who are guided and delivered to good things by an inner knowledge of qualities they have and were born to use, regardless of what surrounding circumstances and bad people decree.Sillitoe's portraits of "angry young men" who are winners seems to favor "nature" in the "nature versus nurture" controversy and explanation of social behavior and outcomes.---------------Written by Tex Allen, SAG Actor. Visit WWW.IMDb.Com and choose "Tex Allen" "resume" for contact information, movie credits, and biographical information about Tex Allen. Tex Allen has reviewed more than 40 movies posted on the website WWW.IMDb.Com (the world's largest movie information database, owned by Amazon.Com) as of January 2011.These include: 1. Alfie (1966) 29 July 2009 2. Alien (1979) 24 July 2009 3. All the Loving Couples (1969) 17 January 2011 4. All the President's Men (1976) 16 November 2010 5. American Graffiti (1973) 22 November 2010 6. Animal House (1978) 16 August 2009 7. Bullitt (1968) 23 July 2009 8. Captain Kidd (1945) 28 July 2009 9. Child Bride (1938) 24 September 2009 10. Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) 22 September 2010 11. Destination Moon (1950) 17 January 2011 12. Detour (1945) 19 November 2010 13. Die Hard 2 (1990) 23 December 2010 14. The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993) 19 November 2010 15. Jack and the Beanstalk (1952) 26 July 2009 16. King Solomon's Mines (1950) 1 December 2010 17. Knute Rockne All American (1940) 2 November 2010 18. Claire's Knee (1970) 15 August 2009 19. Melody Ranch (1940) 10 November 2010 20. Morning Glory (1933) 19 November 2010 21. Mush and Milk (1933) 17 January 2011 22. New Moon (1940) 3 November 2010 23. Pinocchio (1940) 6 November 2010 24. R2PC: Road to Park City (2000) 19 November 2010 25. Salt (2010) 24 August 2010 26. Sunset Blvd. (1950) 1 December 2010 27. The Great Dictator (1940) 1 November 2010 28. The King's Speech (2010) 19 January 2011 29. The Last Emperor (1987) 20 January 2011 30. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) 9 January 2011 31. The Man in the White Suit (1951) 5 August 2009 32. The Philadelphia Story (1940) 5 November 2010 33. The Social Network (2010) 19 January 2011 Written by Tex Allen, SAG-AFTRA movie actor. Visit WWW.IMDb.Me/TexAllen for more information about Tex Allen. Tex Allen's email address is [email protected] Tes Allen Movie Credits, Biography, and 2012 photos at WWW.IMDb.Me/TexAllen. See other Tex Allen written movie reviews....almost 100 titles.... at: "http://imdb.com/user/ur15279309/comments" (paste this address into your URL Browser)