The last angry young man

The Angry Young Man film in British cinema flourished quickly and burned out just as fast in the early 1960s. An offshoot of the Kitchen Sink Realism movement of the mid-1950s, these movies featured working-class characters, frank language and sexuality, and stories of social alienation.

Although numerous movies that could be considered an Angry Young Man film were produced in a few short years, there are three textbook examples—1958’s Look Back in Anger, 1960’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and 1962’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Look Back in Anger is a credible adaptation of the John Osborne play, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning features titanic acting by Albert Finney, but The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (directed by Tony Richardson one year before he won the Oscar for Tom Jones) is the best, if only because it features a cinematic style as restless and rebellious as its characters.

Tom Courtenay plays Colin Smith, an anti-establishment petty thief who gets sent to Ruxton Towers, a reformatory house for juvenile criminals. Smith seems determined not to fit in, but when a latent talent for long-distance running surfaces, he becomes the new favorite—“the blue-eyed boy”—of the headmaster. As his running improves and an interschool competition approaches, Smith is offered more privileges, including the freedom to take long, solitary runs through the countryside. As he runs, his mind drifts to the circumstances leading up to his arrival at Ruxton—the meager upbringing, the casual criminality, the father who refused medicine on his deathbed.

Smith eventually makes his stand against the whip hands of the institution, and it’s a wonderful, potent scene. However, his actions are tinged with the realization that his rebellion was likely as futile and self-defeating as his father’s deathbed stand.