To mark the Bill Douglas Centre’s Angry Young Men retrospective, Jess O’Kane, Screen Editor, pays tribute to the flowering of British cinematic talent in the 1950s and 60s.
In an unusually serendipitous turn of events for this week’s Nerding, the wonderful Bill Douglas Centre currently has an exhibit about Angry Young Men. You should go, or else I’ll turn into Ken Loach and throw an Eccles cake at your mum. Well, not really, but I might shake my fist a bit like the 21st century pansy I am.
After all, compared to our teenage forefathers, we don’t have it so bad. We often take for granted just how frighteningly rigid the class system was just a few generations ago, a system that without some stroke of luck would determine your entire life from cradle to coffin.
The Angry Young Men of the 50s and 60s poured that drudgery and frustration into cinema, using film as a means of social criticism and a catalyst for action. They rejected the dogma that repressed the voices and minds of the working classes, and in doing so produced films that still seem fresh and fearless today.
The Classic
A case in point is the frighteningly bleak The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, adapted by Alan Sillitoe from his novel about a young rebel named Smith, a champion runner in a uniformly grey borstal.
Much like Sillitoe’s book, director Tony Richardson’s piece is as poetic as it is ghostly, interspersed with reflective monologues and flashbacks to Smith’s fraught home life.
At the centre of the film, however, is a powerful message about authority, played out between Smith (Tom Courtenay) and the omnipresent Governor (Michael Redgrave).
As Smith despairs that he is unable to progress in any meaningful way without submitting to the Governor’s wishes, the film leaves us wondering whether personal integrity is worth the alienating effects of rebellion.
Unusually reflective and light-handed, Loneliness distinguishes itself from other Angry Young Men pieces by questioning the values at its core.
The Cult Favourite
If some hilariously melodramatic guest turns in CSI have turned you off Malcolm McDowell, it’s always worth revisiting his early work to remember that he once made Roger Ebert walk out of a cinema for the first and only time.
McDowell’s debut in Lindsay Anderson’s If… still seems astonishingly forward thinking.
He plays a dubious hero named Mick, who attends an oppressive public school where boys are routinely whipped, the staff have strange fetishes and the younger boys are addressed as “scum”.
Anderson’s surreal treatment of the material only intensifies the sense of claustrophobia that builds to the film’s mad, violent climax, in which Mick and his friends find a cache of weapons and go out in a blaze of iconoclastic fury.
Though not always classed amongst the Angry Young Men films of the late 50s and early 60s, If… escalates the themes of angst and repressed passion that typified Anderson’s earlier work.
You Definitely Haven’t Heard of It
I know, I know, this is usually the part where I get my talons out and use some bitchy similes, but given that we’re talking about a very small group of films here, it’s pretty difficult to find a runt.
So instead we’re going to go even further into the counterculture to another Anderson film, a documentary that sparked the Free Cinema movement called Everyday Except Christmas.
Free Cinema was essentially the beginnings of the Angry Young Men; it centred around a group of documentary makers who sought to escape the taught controls of wartime propaganda films and capture Britain as it truly was, again focusing on the experiences of the working class.
Everyday Except Christmas is a simple piece charting a day at Covent Garden market in 1957, from the arrival of produce trucks late at night to the end of the morning’s business.
What’s remarkable, however, is the film’s poetic and meditative quality. Anderson mirrors the bustle and drag of commerce in his sensitive sound editing and camera work, lending the material a realism and vitality.
It’s a great place to start to understand the sympathy and grittiness of the Angry Young Men, and it’s probably the most attractive portrayal of turnips you’ll ever see.
The Verdict
With their Wallace & Gromit accents and Socialist distaste for “forrin” influences, Angry Young Men films can seem more than a little comic to us now. But we shouldn’t laugh, because like its French counterpart, the British New Wave was that rare thing; a moment in history where life and art imitated each other to alter the way we live.
exeposedev 