Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Plot synopsis:
The novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is split into two unequal parts: the bulk of the book, Saturday Night, and the much smaller second part, Sunday Morning.
Saturday Night
Saturday Night begins in a working man's club in Nottingham. Arthur Seaton is 21 years old, and enjoying a night out with Brenda, the wife of a colleague at work. Challenged to a drinking contest, Arthur defeats "Loudmouth" before falling down the stairs drunk. Brenda takes him home with her and they spend the night together. Arthur enjoys breakfast with Brenda before her husband Jack gets home from a weekend at the races.
Arthur works at a lathe at a bicycle factory with his friend Jack. Arthur keeps his mind occupied during the mundane and repetitive work through a mental collage of imagined fantasies, and memories of the past. He earns a good wage of 14 pounds a week, and Robboe, his superior, fears he may get in trouble for letting Arthur earn so much. Soon Arthur hears the news that Jack has been switched to nights, which pleases Arthur as he can now spend more time with Jack's wife. At the same time, Arthur carries on with Brenda's sister Winnie.
During another night out at the pub, Arthur meets Doreen, a young unmarried girl with whom he begins a relatively innocent courtship — all the while keeping Brenda and Winnie a secret. However, although Jack is oblivious to his wife's infidelity, Winnie's husband Bill catches on — and Arthur's actions catch up with him when Bill and an accomplice jump Arthur one night, leaving him beaten and bed-ridden for days.
Sunday Morning
Sunday Morning follows the course of events after Arthur's assault. When Doreen comes to check up on him, Arthur finally comes clean about his affairs with Brenda and Winnie. Doreen stays in a relationship with Arthur despite his dishonesty; Brenda and Winnie disappear from the story. By the end of the novel, Arthur and Doreen have made plans to marry.

Tags: suspenseful, atmospheric

Review:
Indeed when Ben (my friend) and I left we went to our local for a quick pint and, I swear,we both had the uncanny feeling of being part of the film.Time has passed and the working class East and West Midlands have change completely so it may not have such resonance for a new generation but if you want to know what a good slice of England looked and sounded like in the 1950s you should see it: it's better than any documentary.
English history has been full of rebel heroes but the screen tradition really came to fruition during the late Fifties and early Sixties when England's postwar generation was in revolt In the theater, this revolt took the form of the "kitchen sink drama" and the era of the Angry Young Men In the movie industry, it was the era of "Free Cinema," an attempt by young filmmakers to break away from established subjects and standard treatments This raw melodrama deals with Arthur Seaton (Finney), a working class young man who rejects the misery and grind of his home and factory, but whose only possible rebellion takes the form of a cynicism towards authority and a cheerful indulgence in sexual encounters with various ladies of the town His rebellion, though limited, is nevertheless genuine and the film's situation in a working class milieu is, for the habitually middle and upper class conscious British cinema, a much needed step forward....
The "fighting pit prop that wants a pint of beer." He is immoral and the wife of a friend is seen as fair game: Although the consequences are beyond his immature mind.There is good supporting performances from British character actors such as Norman Rossington and Hylda Baker, but this movie belongs to one man and one man alone: Sir Albert Finney.Twenty five years after he is dead the cinematic world is going to wake up and realize how brilliant an actor this man was: Like they did with Humphrey Bogart.
Albert Finney is Arthur, a working-class Brit who lives for "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" in this 1960 film also starring Rachel Roberts, Hylda Baker and Shirley Anne Field.
I've watched it over and over and seen it again today - and forgot how good - and funny in places it really is.Director Karel Reisz used his skills perfectly in this - he took places lit and furnished as he found them, let people naturally perform and simply laced together a piece of cinematographic brilliance.People forget that he also directed such films as The French Lieutenants Woman and produced This Sporting Life, but I personally feel this masterpiece, amongst his early and sadly rare work was the best by far.If you've not seen this film and claim to be a fan of 1960s British Cinema, you'd better get it into your collection and view it very soon - be prepared for some smiles, some laughs, some hard scenes but, overall, a treat.Enjoy!.
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.
Its amazing to look at this film which transformed British Cinema and introduced the angry young man that would later been seen in films like 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner' and 'This Sporting Life'.The fact that it shocked audiences and local authorities because of its themes covering sex and abortion show that this was a time when a great deal of change was taking place in British society.
Its always interesting to see the films that established the actors we admire and I'm certainly a fan of Albert Finney so I was shocked when I saw this film and felt that he wasn't really very good in it.The opening scene where his character, Arthur Seaton, is counting the parts he is making in his factory seemed to introduce a highly overwrought man that shouted all the time.
Thankfully the unnecessary 'anger' at the start was toned down later but I still felt at the end that Finney could have done greater justice to his role.Walking around with a straight back and his chest out, talking twice as loud as he needs to seemed to resemble an angry old man rather than an angry young man and I almost expected him to talk about how kids nowadays didn't know they were born.Its unusual that an actor from a working class background didn't convince me when playing a character that was not that dissimilar from himself whilst actors like Tom Courtenay in 'Loneliness...' and particularly Richard Harris in 'This Sporting Life' did it much better.However, I gradually found myself being more and more absorbed in this film as it started to develop a storyline and move away from a young man being angry simply for the sake of it.Rachel Roberts excels in her role as the married woman who becomes pregnant by Seaton and its a shame that this actress has been forgotten when you consider her performance here and the marvellous one she gave opposite Harris in 'This Sporting Life'.Shirley Anne Field also does well as Doreen the girl looking to settle down and it is in her relationship with Seaton where I disagree with many people's assessment of the film.
a slice of brit life, 1960 and a bit before (club bands in jackets and ties, still); great finney, great screenplay (and loneliness of long distance runner), good rachel roberts but finny early 20s, she mid 30s and looking mid 40s, so as arthur's love interest has you wondering at the start; but that's part of it, a coworkers wife, easy to do, and another way of showing his contempt for family and getting ahead-all propaganda; on the other hand he gives money to his family, buy yourself something; the bleakness, work then play and drink, is tail end of the gin age (good book called gin on the history) when workers were 6 days a week, 10 or more hours a day, dickensian, and one day to get as blasted as possible- to forget it all; weak link is heralded director with one very not new-wave static shot after another; good part, movie wise, is there's no artifice; actors are all in, no later frills like alfie turning to the camera letting us in on his cynicism- like we didn't get that already; so a 7?
Arthur Seaton is out for a good time within the confines of his life and the film foreshadows attitudes that became prevalent in later decades.Shot in black and white, probably to give a realstic feel, and the scenes at the fairground are particularly good even today.I spotted a street and pub near to my home in London used as one of the night exteriors, so although some must have been shot in the grim North, parts of London stood in for Nottingham.The film is short, pithy and refreshing and even if the central character isn't that nice a guy, your sympathy is with him.
Filmed on location at Nottingham, Albert Finney plays Arthur Seaton a bored factory worker who is having an affair with his workmate's wife (Rachel Roberts).
A young working man is susceptible to fall into a lifestyle including womanizing and living life to one's own terms, yet other characters who are nothing like him work with Arthur at the factory as well.
Perhaps, then, this film is a commentary on the young adult in England rather than the entire working class.This is clearly a "rebellion" movie which gets its point across with some strong voice-over work by Albert Finney, and while the acting is great and Arthur is a well-developed, detestable person, at some points the audience can't help but ask "so what?"3.0/4.0.
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.
He hates his job, has constant battles with an elderly neighborhood woman and really only knows what he doesn't want - very angry young man stuff.The movie is worth seeing alone for the acting - for the debut of Finney, a great performance by Rachel Roberts, as the wife and Shirley Anne Field as another interest of Finney.
UK 1960 English (B&W); Drama (Woodfall); 89 minutes (PG certificate)Crew includes: Karel Reisz (Director); Alan Sillitoe (Screenwriter, adapting his Novel); Tony Richardson (Producer)Cast includes: Albert Finney, Shirley Anne Field, Rachel Roberts, Hylda BakerBAFTA Awards (3): British Film, British Actress (Roberts), Most Promising Newcomer (Finney)A hard-living factory worker (Finney), out for a good time, pursues a chaste single girl (Field), while maintaining an affair with an older, married woman (Roberts).Gritty, once-controversial kitchen sink drama, notable for Finney's first starring role and working-class hero being less "angry" and more hedonistic than others that emerged from the British New Wave..
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.
Lumped, I read, with the 'X' certificate upon British release for its stark and confrontational attitude towards life in an English city seemingly devoid of soul, smiles and all else remotely pleasant; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a pulsating, stark and confrontational look at the dishevelment of the working class, sternly uninterested in conforming to either genre or concrete narrative framework, but morbidly fascinating as a result.The loose cannon at the heart of it all is Albert Finney's Arthur Seaton, a quite glorious portrayal on behalf of Finney of a factory worker pummelling himself into the ground both inside and outside of the work place.
Where the film will take us after this confrontational opening is a quite harrowing descent into this man's life and mind, those around him and their lives which he makes somewhat of a misery, given ample attention.By nights, predominantly weekends, Arthur works himself into a state of numbness or until he drops in another incarnation; specifically, in the way of alcohol at a local public house rather than at hard graft in a factory.
The atmosphere of aggression and general feeling of pained immorality is everywhere; Arthur's affair with Brenda standing alongside the relationship he's in with another woman named Doreen (Field) whereas the sorts of ill-conceived and childish antics he gets up in toying with other locals offers fleeting amusement away from the dirge of everything else in everyday life.The item that brings the film to a hilt is directly linked to that of Brenda; Arthur's affair with her resulting in a pregnancy as her husband Jack, a character of a downplayed and hushed nature played by a certain Bryan Pringle, continues to mingle around heightening tension and threatening things to a point of escalation.
Arthur works at a factory operating on machines and lives a rather quiet life with his parents in Nottingham, England, but he has gotten himself involved in a secret relationship with a married woman named Brenda whom he has strong feelings for.This engagingly directed British production which was produced by director Tony Richardson (1928-1991) and Canadian producer Harry Saltzman (1915-1994) and shot on location in Nottingham and London in England, is a well-paced character-driven and dialog-driven romantic drama with acute portrayals of young love, interpersonal relations and everyday life.
With his first feature film from 1960, Czech-born filmmaker Karel Reisz (1926-2002) creates exceptionally realistic milieu depictions of industrial working-class England during the early nineteen sixties and an accomplished study of character about a young man who keeps getting himself into trouble for acting on his strong opposition against a system which he thinks is suppressing the working-class and has left their evident mark on his parents.The prominent and heartened acting performance by English actor Albert Finney and the significant and understated acting performances by Welsh actress Rachel Roberts (1927-1980) and British actress Shirley Anne Field underlines the power of this unsentimental, humorous and gripping independent film which gained BAFTA Awards for Best British Film, Best British Actress Rachel Roberts and Most Promising Newcomer Albert Finney in 1961.
Born myself in 1960, the year this film was released, I thus just missed actually living in the factory-driven outside-toilet existence in the years in Britain just before the "swinging sixties" of Harold Wilson's "white-heat" technological era, but obviously my parents did and that makes this worm's eye "slice of life" all the more fascinating to view today some 50 years later.Remarkably candid in its depiction of life as it was lived among the working classes and in particular its treatment of hitherto taboo subjects like extra-marital affairs, sex and abortion, the film immediately drops us into the grinding factory-working conditions of Albert Finney's character Arthur.
The support work too is excellent, particularly Rachel Roberts as the bored housewife who knows exactly the bargain she's made in exchange for the passion Finney shows her in the bedroom her wet-sponge husband Bryan Pringle can't and Norman Rossington as his more conventional conformist mate who can't fully understand Finney's constant raging against the machine.Freddie Francis' photography is marvellous in conveying the grim backdrop to the drama and Karel Reisz's direction is always to the point and while I'm no fan of jazz music, Johnny Dankworth's off-beat soundtrack serves its subject matter well too.Life then as it was lived in the era that the prevailing Prime Minister of the time, Harold MacMillan said had never had it so good.
In "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" Albert Finney plays Arthur Seaton, a rebellious and impish young man.
Albert Finney drives this film with his brilliant performance as Arthur Seaton, an angry young factory worker from Nottingham who lives for the weekend.His infectious appetite for trouble has developed a reputation for being a rogue in the terraces and ginnels of his neighbourhood.
Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (1960) Is The Best "Angry Young Man" Movie Of All. 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.
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.
A bleak drab setting, Finney as angry young man, Arthur, conventional love interest in Shirley-Ann Field as Doreen, and illicit love interest in married Rachel Roberts as Brenda who falls pregnant by Arthur.The social commentary is finely observed by Director Karel Reisz and writer Alan Sillitoe.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is another of the 'kitchen sink' dramas that were all the rage at the turn of the 1960s, and it's also an 'angry young man' film to boot.
Basically, set in 1960's Nottingham, young factory machinist Arthur Seaton (BAFTA winning and nominated Albert Finney) is hardworking and only gets paid modest wages, he is angry at many things in his life, including his parents, and he does not to stay living in drudgery like all around him.