Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ***** (1960, Albert Finney, Rachel Roberts, Bryan Pringle, Shirley Anne Field, Norman Rossington, Hylda Baker) – Classic Movie Review 1,476

Director Karel Reisz’s compelling and convincing 1960 movie version of Alan Sillitoe’s bestselling 1958 first novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning made a new international star out of Albert Finney, almost overnight.

Finney plays the anti-hero Arthur Seaton, an angry-ish, frustrated young machinist at a Nottingham bike factory who starts an affair with Brenda (Rachel Roberts), the bored and rather dowdy wife of an older workmate (Bryan Pringle). Being the happy-go-lucky guy he is, Seaton also begins a relationship with Doreen (Shirley Anne Field), a sweet single woman closer to his age whom meets in a pub. 

Spearheading the British New Wave kitchen sink dramas, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning came as a breath of fresh air in a stale and stuffy British society, as it boldly and profitably tackles issues of working class life seriously and portrays sex and abortion realistically. Produced by Tony Richardson with Bond producer Harry Saltzman as executive producer, the film won the BAFTA Award for Best British Film in 1961.

There is passion in the playing, particularly in Finney’s electrifying performance and in Roberts’s tragic portrait of a middle-aged woman scorned in what surely must be her last fling. And there’s poetry in the filming, thanks partly to director of photography Freddie Francis’s evocative black and white cinematography and the evocative use of the then supremely depressingly grimy Nottingham locations.

There is a social and political dimension too to the screenplay (by Sillitoe himself) in this honest look at life in the grungy East Midlands. Audiences of the day cheerily identified with the loveable rogue of an anti-hero Arthur Seaton, but they were not really supposed to be on his side and approve of his behaviour.

Among a series of fine support performances, Pringle is outstanding as the workmate who finds out about his wife’s affair and takes revenge on Seton by giving him a severe beating, and Shirley Anne Field glows seductively as the sweet and yearning Doreen (‘I want to go where there’s life and there’s people’).

Doreen (‘Rotten name, ain’t it?’) works in a local hairnet factory and lives with her mother. She meets Arthur in a pub and agrees to go to the pictures with him – ‘but not on t’back row’. He says the screen will be blurry if they sit any nearer, but she replies: ‘You want glasses by the sound of it.’  He tells her not to be late and she says: ‘I won’t be, but if I am, you’ll just have to wait, won’t yer?’

This Sixties British realist classic is still a great piece of intelligent entertainment and now a key text of its time. It’s important and vital to the film’s allure that many of the exteriors are actually filmed on location in Nottingham, though the night scene with a pub named The British Flag was filmed along Culvert Road in Battersea, south London.

Norman Rossington, Hylda Baker, Robert Cawdron, Edna Morris, Elsie Wagstaff, Frank Pettitt, Avis Bunnage, Colin Blakely and Peter Sallis are among the familiar faces of the day.

Finney went on to new success in the very different Tom Jones (1963).

Finney and Field had previously appeared together in The Entertainer (1960) as well as on stage in The Lily White Boys.

The cast are Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton, Shirley Anne Field as Doreen, Rachel Roberts as Brenda, Hylda Baker as Aunt Ada, Norman Rossington as Bert, Bryan Pringle as Jack, Robert Cawdron as Robboe, Edna Morris as Mrs Bull, Elsie Wagstaff as Mrs Seaton, Frank Pettitt as Mr Seaton, Avis Bunnage as Blousy Woman, Colin Blakely as Loudmouth, Irene Richmond as Doreen’s Mother, Louise Dunn as Betty, Anne Blake as Civil Defence Officer, Frank Smith as Himself, Peter Madden as Drunken Man, Cameron Hall as Mr Bull, Alister Williamson as Police Constable, Peter Sallis as Man in Suit, and Jack Smethurst as Waiter.

Alan Sillitoe (4 March 1928 – 25 April 2010) was born in Nottingham to working class parents. Like Arthur Seaton, his father worked at the Raleigh Bicycle Company factory and so did he for four years.

Albert Finney (9 May 1936 – 7 February 2019) made his film debut with The Entertainer (1960), and went on to be nominated for five Oscars, winning BAFTA, Golden Globe, Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Shirley Anne Field (born Shirley Broomfield; 27 June 1936 – 10 December 2023).

RIP Shirley Anne Field, who died on 10 December 2023, at the age of 87.

Her first film appearance was as an extra in Simon and Laura (1955), followed by many small parts, but her first sizeable film role was in Horrors of the Black Museum (1959). She had minor parts in Once More, with Feeling! (1960) and And the Same to You (1960), then a larger role in Peeping Tom (1960).

Her breakthrough came when Tony Richardson picked her to play beauty queen Tina Lapford in The Entertainer (1960). She said: ‘It was Tony Richardson I owe it all to.’ The Entertainer allowed her to escape from her starlet roles in ‘five years being hassled or groped by this star or that’.

It led to her best known role as Doreen in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1,476

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com/

Albert Finney in Tom Jones (1963).