The Angry Silence **** (1960, Richard Attenborough, Pier Angeli, Michael Craig, Bernard Lee, Alfred Burke) – Classic Movie Review 2111

Director Guy Green’s 1960 drama The Angry Silence is a refreshingly bracing, grown-up and engrossing thought piece that finds the 1960 British cinema in a surprisingly serious frame of mind in a story that tackles what it sees as the trouble with British trade unions. It presents the opposite side of the coin to Peter Sellers’s I’m All Right Jack (1959), which is both comedic and pro-union, and came out the previous year.

Richard Attenborough stars in one of his finest performances as Tom Curtis, a young factory worker who won’t join an unofficial wildcat strike. He decides to stand up against his work-mates and fellow union members want to hold the strike. And, as a result, he is sent to Coventry by his co-workers, who deliberately ostracise him as a scab by not talking to him and avoiding his company.

Bryan Forbes’s provocative screenplay makes a thoroughly tasty banquet of the highly controversial issues it explores. It is based on a story by the film’s co-star, Michael Craig, who provided the original treatment for the screen with Richard Gregson. The screenplay had the honour of being Oscar nominated. Forbes won the BAFTA Film Award for Best British Screenplay. Green picked up two awards at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1960, though failed to win the Golden Berlin Bear.

The Angry Silence remains still controversial and effective as union-bashing propaganda, though actually the theme for this film is intended to be every man’s right to stand up for his own individuality and freedom. It tries to suggest that it’s supposed to be standing up for individual rights against both unions and bosses as the hero plucks up his courage and dares fight to keep his individual freedom. It’s a fine line, and it does come over as union-bashing, but then so do elements in I’m All Right Jack, particularly Sellers’s monstrous union rep Fred Kite.

With this thought-provoking, ambiguous treatment of a stirring theme set against the unsexy setting of labour relations, it is a very rare film indeed for mainstream British cinema. It’s now valuable for its portrait of industrial relations in Britain at the time and raises important on-going issues about the relationships between employees, managers and owners. Good-hearted, liberal film folk Green, Forbes and Attenborough mean well, but this comes over in a conservative, right-wing kind of way.

Outstanding in the support cast are Bernard Lee as an archetypal shop steward and Alfred Burke as the commie-sympathising union organiser. TV stars of the day Daniel Farson and Alan Whicker appear as themselves. Also in the cast are Pier Angeli, Geoffrey Keen, Laurence Naismith, Russell Napier, Penelope Horner, Brian Bedford, Brian Murray, Norman Bird, Beckett Bould, Oliver Reed, Edna Petrie, Lloyd Pearson and Norman Shelley.

It was banned in Wales where the cinema chains were controlled by the miners’ union. But Attenborough intervened and screened it for the union leaders and the ban was revoked.

Bryan Forbes died aged 86 on May 8 2013. Richard Attenborough died on August 24 2014, aged 90.

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2111

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