Parky at the Pictures (DVD 20/10/2011)

Although John Osborne's Look Back in Anger had already opened at the Royal Court Theatre, it was Jack Clayton's adaptation of John Braine's scathing portrait of northern working-class life, Room at the Top (1958), that turned social realism into headline news. It was one thing for continental films to tackle such taboo topics as pre-marital sex and adultery, but no British film had previously discussed such adult situations in so caustic a vernacular, let alone depicted them with such casual frankness. For audiences reared on Ian Carmichael and Norman Wisdom, this was a devastating discovery, made all the more thrillingly immediate by the fact that so much of the action related to their own everyday experience.

Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) arrives in the thriving Yorkshire town of Warnley and sets out to elevate his social status by seducing wealthy industrialist's daughter Susan Brown (Heather Sears). However, by the time of his shotgun wedding, he has fallen for Alice Aisgill (Simone Signoret), an unhappily married Frenchwoman, who is 10 years his senior and ruinously in love with him.

There had been cads in British movies before. But James Mason's sins had been committed in costume in Gainsborough period romps that consciously romanticised his roguery. Laurence Harvey, however, wore an ordinary suit and worked in the borough treasurer's department. Moreover, he was a former RAF POW. Yet, he was prepared to use his looks and charm to seduce his way to affluence and acceptability.

But while Joe Lambton was cynical and exploitative, he wasn't an archetypal `angry young man'. He was proud of his roots: he just recognised their inconvenience to his aspiration. Moreover, despite Jack Clayton and Freddie Francis's evocative use of their Yorkshire locations, this wasn't exactly a `kitchen sink' drama, either, as neither Heather Sears's naive daddy's girl nor Simone Signoret's coolly sensual outsider skivvied away in the inner-city backstreets.

However, Neil Patterson's acrid screenplay still scandalised the British Establishment and so appalled the Breen Office that it was denied a release certificate. Indeed, this did as much for the film's international reputation as its raft of awards, which eventually included a Best Actress Oscar for Signoret. Despite being on screen for a comparatively short time, she walks away with the picture and her sophisticated passion contrasts sharply with Harvey's poorly accented and occasionally awkward display of narcissistic chauvinism.

Written by John Osborne and directed for the Royal Court Theatre by Tony Richardson, Look Back in Anger shocked the British stage establishment when it opened in May 1956. Its fury, bitterness and coarse eloquence shattered the complacent classicism that held sway in the smugly middlebrow West End and riled the conservative press with its contention that there were `no good, brave causes left'.

Market stallholder Jimmy Porter (Richard Burton) takes out his frustrations at the restrictions and hypocrisies of postwar Britain on his docile wife, Allison (Mary Ure), and her actress friend, Helena Charles (Claire Bloom), who is eventually seduced by his dangerous, righteous anger.

Unfortunately, by the time that Nigel Kneale scripted this screen adaptation, much of the wind had been taken from its sails by the prior release of Room at the Top, which made Joe Lampton, rather than Jimmy Porter, the first `angry young man' to reach suburbia and the inner-city backstreets. Both were misogynist predators who exploited women to disguise their own social inadequacy. But they became iconic figures for a generation unwilling to knuckle down to the realities of dwindling imperialism and welfare patronage.

Hired at the insistence of the backers (who included Warner Bros) to give this contentiously risky project a box-office safety net, Richard Burton turned in a typically titanic performance, as the cynic whose then subversive philosophising now sounds like so much wind and fury. But he is too old for the part and his style is too polished to convey Porter's self-pitying ennui and callous sexual arrogance. Consequently, he is less persuasive than his female co-stars - Mary Ure (who was reprising the role of the wife who can no longer distinguish between Jimmy's inarticulate love and his garrulous cruelty), Claire Bloom (who almost out-vamps Simone Signoret as the refined other woman) and Dame Edith Evans, who comes close to stealing the picture as Mrs Tanner, the Cockney mother of one of Jimmy's friends, who was invented for the film.

Richardson's Free Cinema background ensures that this is a cinematically credible exercise in social realism. But its dramatic tropes quickly became clichés and it's now hard to watch this important picture without some 50 years of subsequent parody continuously intruding.

Czech-born Karel Reisz had established his reputation alongside Richardson on Momma Don't Allow (1955) and solo with We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959) and his sense of place and the ability to locate drama within the everyday made his adaptation of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) one of the best entries in the kitchen sink canon. It's also the least dated, as Arthur Seaton's sour assertion, `All I want is a good time. The rest is propaganda.', could also have been the mantra of both Thatcherite Yuppidom and Blairite Laddism.

Detesting his job as a lathe-operator, Nottingham rebel Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) seeks solace in weekend boozing bouts, the pursuit of the chaste Doreen Gretton (Shirley Ann Field) and the easy conquest of workmate Jack (Bryan Pringle)'s bored wife, Brenda (Rachel Roberts). That is, until the latter gets pregnant.

Such is the veracity of Freddie Francis's industrial vistas that Nottingham almost becomes as potent a character as Seaton himself. But the factories and backstreets have none of the bluff charm that Albert Finney summoned for his surly anti-hero, whose impish disregard for authority took the curse off his cavalier attitude towards women.

But while such chauvinism would now be considered inexcusable, contemporary audiences could identify with Seaton's desperate bids to escape from the soul-destroying monotony of his job and his frustration at the social and sexual conventions that further restricted his options. Consequently, he was hailed as a true working-class icon in a way that neither Joe Lambton nor Jimmy Porter ever were, as instead of bourgeois pretensions he nursed a credibly simmering sense of resentment and resignation that dominated every waking hour until he finally recognised that life was more about responsibility than rebellion.

Some critics have accused the film of misogyny. Yet, in revealing the extent to which women had resumed their traditional subservience in postwar Britain, Reisz also suggested the emergence of a new independence by giving Brenda and Doreen a measure of control over their angry young man by respectively indulging and resisting his carnality. However, Reisz remains acutely aware of the fact that it's invariably the woman who pays the sexual consequences and the sequence in which the impotent Jack slaps the pregnant Brenda at the fairground (having been forced to ask his brother's squaddie mates to beat up Arthur) contrasts with Doreen's pragmatic acceptance of Seaton's churlish proposal of marriage.

With social realism being the style de jour, John Schlesinger's feature debut, A Kind of Loving (1961), was overlooked by many critics who had yet to be convinced of Alan Bates's star quality in The Entertainer (1960) and Whistle Down the Wind (1961). Moreover, moviegoers were less than enticed by the prospect of witnessing what was, to many of them, the everyday reality of being either ensnared in a loveless marriage or forced to live with disapproving in-laws until they found their financial feet.

Consequently, this adaptation of Stan Barstow's novel only found an audience after it won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Recognising that this wasn't just another portrait of an angry young man or a resolute study in northern miserabilism, viewers came to appreciate the sour wit of Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse's screenplay and the compassion of the direction.

Northern draughtsman Vic Brown (Alan Bates) flirts with typist Ingrid Rothwell (June Ritchie) until he finally seduces her. However, he's forced to marry her when she becomes pregnant, but draws the line at living with her shrewish mother (Thora Hird).

Having established his social realist credentials with the 1961 documentary, Terminus, Schlesinger was able to locate his characters within their industrial environment without reducing them to caricatures. He allowed Thora Hird to play Mrs Rothwell as a shrill, petty bourgeois termagant. But for all his arrogant self-obsession and her unemancipated consumerism, Bates and Ritchie are essentially decent people struggling to come to terms with the social, moral and economic temptations arising from their changing times.

Indeed, this is a compelling snapshot of Britain before the Sixties began to swing. Football matches and brass bands may still be the opiates of the urban masses, but television is clearly beginning to alter people's opinions and expectations through its dramas and insights into how the other half lived. Thus, this is as much a film about the decline of traditional communities in the face of growing individualism as it is about whether Vic and Ingrid will find the kind of loving they seek by striking out alone.

Shelagh Delaney packed so many contentious issues into her Royal Court stage play A Taste of Honey that it could almost have been played as a parody of the prevailing socio-style. Pre-marital promiscuity, cross-racial romance and homosexuality were just some of the tabloid topics she seized upon. But, by tightening the episodic structure and returning to his documentary roots, director and co-scenarist Tony Richardson was able to give the only social realist drama with a female protagonist a human interest angle that was lacking from its more confrontational contemporaries.

Frustrated by her mother Helen (Dora Bryan)'s preoccupation with her latest fling, Peter (Robert Stephens), Salford teenager Jo (Rita Tushingham) becomes pregnant after a brief romance with Jimmy (Paul Danquah), a black sailor on shore leave, and she moves in with gay shoe salesman, Geoffrey (Murray Melvin).

Jo is much less angry than her male counterparts. But her lot is, in many ways, much tougher, as not only does her gender limit her employment prospects, but she is also expected to adhere to a stricter moral code, if only to avoid the stigma of an unwanted pregnancy. Moreover, in Helen, she has interfering in every aspect of her existence an example of what happens to those who do not abide by such bourgeois rules.

Reuniting with Walter Lassally after Momma Don't Allow, Richardson set out to transfuse the Free Cinema spirit into a dramatic feature. Shooting exclusively on location - in Salford, Blackpool and a disused house on the Fulham Road that cost £20 a week to rent - he worked in whatever conditions he found on the day and, consequently, captured a sense of life being lived.

This was reinforced by the laudably naturalistic performances. The debuting Rita Tushingham handled wisecracks, insults and laments without ever seeming cocksure or mawkish, while Murray Melvin reprised his stage role with a dignified melancholy that contrasted strongly with Dirk Bogarde's showier display in the same year's Victim. But it was Dora Bryan's turn as the hard-drinking, self-serving Helen that most surprised 60s audiences used to seeing her in harmless comedy roles.

Despite its occasionally patronising tone, this proved a significant influence on the spit`n'sawdust soap opera and it remains a touching study of both vulnerable youth and a social order that's not as bygone as some would have us believe.

Richardson was always the prolific of the social realists and, before he signed off to win an Oscar for his adaptation of Joseph Fielding's Tom Jones (1963), he directed The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).

Sent to the Ruxton Towers for robbing a bakery, Nottingham teenager Colin Smith (Tom Courtenay) thinks back on his dead-end life while training for the cross-country race against a nearby public school that is the overriding preoccupation of the borstal's governor (Michael Redgrave).

Based on an Alan Sillitoe novella, this was less a study of an angry young man than of an alienated kid whose `whatever' attitude contrasted sharply with the resentful socio-sexual consciousness of the period's other anti-heroes. Colin Smith wasn't bright enough to understand what was wrong with the British class structure in the early 1960s. But he knew something wasn't right and he proceeded to kick against it in a childish, but undeniably effective manner.

As in the earlier Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the Nottingham backstreets are effectively used by Richardson and Lassally. But, both the visual and the narrative style owe more to the nouvelle vague than what was becoming standard social realism. Consequently, this always feels more like a calculated work of agit-prop than an authentic proletarian drama. Nonetheless, the flashbacks are more than a contrivance, as the cross-cutting between Colin's past and present reinforces the political power of the parallel plotlines and confirms the hopelessness of his situation, as he's no better off with his own kind than he is with the patronising bourgeois Governor.

Richardson's self-conscious focus on the filmic quality of his story might have reduced Colin to a class cypher. But the debuting Tom Courtenay turns a resistible character into an unlikely rebel with a cause by adding a curt charm to Colin's nervous energy and eccentric nonconformism. There are certainly shades of Billy Fisher (whom the 24 year-old Courtenay had just played in the West End and would do again in John Schlesinger's film of Billy Liar) in Colin's confusion and unconventional recalcitrance. But it's more intriguing to compare his performance with that of David Bradley in Ken Loach's Kes (1969).

Courtenay won a BAFTA for his work. But he was ably supported by Avis Bunnage, as the sluttish mother who bequeathed him his indomitable spirit, and Michael Redgrave as the complacent governor, whose own inadequacies and class envy are so pitilessly exposed by that final glorious act of defiance.

A decade after his short, Thursday's Children (1953), won an Academy Award, Lindsay Anderson, the founding father of Free Cinema, finally made his feature bow. Unfortunately, the commercial failure of This Sporting Life, his glowering adaptation of David Storey's hard-hitting novel, marked the end of the kitchen sink era, in which angry young men vented their spleen against a world that didn't understand them, and a new phase of swinging escapism was ushered in by Richardson's freewheeling period romp, Tom Jones. However, the story of Frank Machin, the Yorkshire miner who briefly samples the high life while playing rugby league for his hometown team, has since been reappraised as social realism's most complex picture.

The galacticos currently scooping obscene sums for parading their skills in the Premier League would do well to watch this uncompromising study of the transient benefits of sporting celebrity. Machin may be a terrace favourite for his brutish approach to the game. But his prowess counts for little with either the club's self-serving owners, his envious teammates or his landlady, Margaret, whose psychological fragility after the suicide of her factory worker husband has hardened into an impenetrable indifference that Frank's clumsy efforts at affection simply can't breach.

The Oscar-nominated Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts occasionally struggle to disguise their respective Irish and Welsh accents, and Harris is sometimes uncertain whether he's playing Marlon Brando, Richard Burton or an emotionally and intellectually stunted everyman. But Anderson is, nevertheless, more interested in their passion and repression than their regional authenticity. Never had the pains and pleasures, fantasies and frustrations of the British proletariat been so starkly depicted on screen. Largely telling his tale in flashback and filming in a dour monochrome that not only reinforced the bleakness of the grim northern town, but also invited comparison with the expressionist imagery of John Ford and Ingmar Bergman, Anderson delivered an almost Antonionian treatise on alienation and the inability to communicate that complemented the more cynical asides on class, gender and fame. Sadly, neither the industry nor the audience were ready for such arthouse intensity.

A hit on both page and stage, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall's Billy Liar was brought to the screen by John Schlesinger in 1963 as a faultless blend of social realism and satirical fantasy. The only comedy among the new wave crop, it clearly owed debts to James Thurber's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. But Waterhouse rooted his daydreamer in a world so real that both the reveries he uses to escape from his mundane existence and his refusal to leave for pastures new make perfect sense.

Billy Fishes (Tom Courtenay) drives parents Geoffrey and Alice (Wilfred Pickles and Mona Washbourne) to distraction with his failure to focus on his future. While working for undertakers Duxbury (Finlay Currie) and Shadrack (Leonard Rossiter), he seeks refuge in the neverland of Ambrosia, where he is supreme dictator. But he is no more committed to either girlfriends Barbara (Helen Fraser), Rita (Gwendolyn Watts) and Liz (Julie Christie) or his ambition to go to London and write gags for comedian Danny Boon (Leslie Randall).

Billy is anything but an angry young man. He's too divorced from everyday reality to be more than mildly irritated by having to earn his living or look after his grandmother (Ethel Griffies). Moreover, he isn't that opposed to conformity and succumbs to accepting his lot with a meekness that makes his psychological rebellion so deeply tragicomic. Yet for all his mischievous geniality, Billy also has a dark side. He's deceitful and intolerant of others and these unattractive traits manifest themselves in his attempt to destroy the calendars he failed to deliver and his recurrent fancy of gunning down those who cross him. Indeed, it's very much to Courtenay's credit that he retains our sympathy, even after he abandons Christie (who was a late replacement for the indisposed Topsy Jane) at the railway station. But Schlesinger and Denys Coop pack the CinemaScope frame with such drab provincialism and grizzly respectability that it's possible to forgive anything to this hapless prisoner of an imagination that's both boundless and treacherous.