To the Life
By ISABEL QUIGLY
Saturday Night and Sun- day Morning, (War- ner.) — London Film Festival. (National Film Theatre.) THE truth is a slap in the eye to some people and I think that's what one of the critics meant when he said that Saturday Night and Sunday Morn- ing (director : Karel Reisz; 'X' certificate) Made Room at the Top look like a Sunday school picnic (or something of the sort). I don't think he can have meant it was more shocking in the ordinary sense of the word (more eyebrow- raising, more outspoken, more sexy and gen- erally epatant), but just that it was more authen- tic. without Room at the Top's occasional lapses into social caricature; so you believe it and take It to heart. Saturday Night and Sunday Morn- ing seems to me the first British feature film in Which today's working-class world has appeared: not the variations on low life' we have seen in (say) the film versions of the Osborne plays, not the working-class comics that for years have been on our screens in the shape of Kathleen Harrison and a few others like her, not the genteelly transi- tional war-time workers of films like Waterloo Road, but people today with today's attitudes and outlooks and today's money and bounce and hopelessness. Being all about factory workers in Nottingham and (I'm ready to bet) dead accurate In detail as well as atmosphere, it might get itself thought (by those who hate the thought) a piece of deadly social realism glum as a wet washing clay. Which it isn't—because it has, as I said, that bounce, the youthful bumptiousness of a new class that begins (between bouts of despair at per the status quo) to stretch and feel its muscles. his one has to thank not just the truth (which, after all, may be glum on occasions) but the pugnacious high spirits of the whole tale and Alan Sillitoe's script from his novel, Reisz's direction—never from above, always from inside --and the cast, every bit of it. The story itself is nothing that need be remark- able: a young factory worker who lives for his Saturday nights—and above all for his Saturday night self, with its attitudes and clothes, its swank and fun---and has the wife of a man he knows (and despises) as his mistress, and gives her a child she tries to get rid of, and about the same time tires of her and takes up with a girl his own age who has the toughness to handle him and bring him round to the idea of marriage. All this, after all, could be told (well, not quite perhaps) 11 any woman's magazine: what gives it its point 13 its portrait of Arthur and Arthur's whole way of life: As played by Albert Finney Arthur embodies it all : • truculence, toughness, hope, hopelessness; scorn of the middle-aged (not _necessarily middle-class) values, the telly- Ptiness of people like his parents; violence and cruel jokes. This and a physical exuberance that makes so much of it seem attractive: you have only to see the way he rides a bike up on to a pavement to feel his strength and easy energy.
Another perfectly exact performance comes from Shirley Ann Field, a girl who did wonders with the part of Tina in The Entertainer; in this case (as in that) it is more ,a triumph of person- ality than, strictly speaking, of acting: her appear- ance, her manner, the edge of hardness, the slightly, even sweetly calculating eye and with- drawn, reserved air at moments, never quite taken in, never completely convinced. The rest are as good, as well in their place, as convincingly in their background : Rachel Roberts as the touch- ingly tough good sort, Hylda Baker as the wise, sharp aunt, Norman, Rossington as her son, Arthur's best friend—all of them, neighbours, friends, enemies, looking and sounding as they should. There is one place when I thought it toppled into fiction : when the climax of every- thing came during a fair, and terrible discoveries were made and hearts seared amid raucous music, candy floss and merry-go-rounds, against the old associations of which any director on earth is powerless. But that's the exception. The rest is fine, tight, true, unexaggerated, and the hope- fullest thing the British cinema could have turned out, these rather dull days it's having.
The London Film Festival continued, and produced its colossus: Visconti's Rocco and his Brothers, now stirring up the sort of row in Italy—with clerical and nationalistic outrage all round—that La Dolce Vita stirred a few months ago; much of the outrage being based on the absurd question 'What will the neighbours think?'—as if, looking at it purely from the prestige point of view, Italy's neighbours aren't going to be a thousand times more impressed by the fact of such a film being made by an Italian director than horrified by its (not so much horrifying as tragic) contents. Anyway, here it is, a film so rich, so vast it grows satisfactorily in the memory as it does on the screen—in stature, till you can accept as grandeur what might other- wise seem the unbearable melodrama of its climax. As in anything that deals with the com- plex relationship between the Italian Mezzo- giorno and the prosperous north, there is plenty of allusion to puzzle a foreigner, much in the extremely brilliant script that must arouse images and feelings we cannot share, or not entirely. But the weight of the film is what counts: its enormity of feeling. I don't like the word 'epic'—too glibly applied to Visconti's treatment of his people. It sounds as if the humanity has been left out of them, whereas what Rocco has is humanity intensified, the narrow Italian family life seen and felt and heard with such a weight of passion that it seems no longer narrow but immense, concentrated with meaning and applications to the world around it. It isn't even (at nineteen reels and over three hours) too long. Its faults are failures of character and casting. I hope to write at length about it later.
There have been disappointments too: mine have been Cacoyannis's English-speaking Our Last Spring, with half Greek, half British cast, a painfully slow and very stagy film about adolescent passions, violent and romantic at once, and both unacceptably; Carlos Saura's Los Golfos, which I saw with high hopes and ended yawning over; Leopoldo Torre Nilsson's Fin de Fiesta, which looks like pastiche Orson Welles—ceilings beetling over every set, everyone photographed from below or above, meaningless views of feet, Chins and angular staircases, almost pitch-dark interiors, as well as a galumphing style. I liked Grigori Chukhrai's Ballad of a Soldier, a Russian film, which is a charmer.
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