There is no doubt that this film had some of the best of British talent from an era which was particularly blessed compared to the present. Tom Courtenay a newly discovered talent, Michael Redgrave a well established one. Tony Richardson, the best director of his generation.
Stylistically the film is both determined by - and suffers from - being a kind of confluence of currents that were modish at, and somewhat before, the time of its making. There is at times cinema verite wobbly/blurred camera-work and improvisational-sounding dialogue, a working class kitchen sink setting and something of the angst of "Look back in Anger" (but of a griping resentful sort rather than John Osborne's explosive and searingly honest kind). It is then a kind of marriage - but not one made in Heaven, more the other place. The treatment of class-conflict (the bringing together of the public school youths and their opposite numbers from the "approved school" (reform school) in an athletic competition is a complete damp squib (compare Lindsay Anderson's "If" for example), no point at all appears to be made.
Why then was this film so well received? Deeply attached to his family and North of England working class roots, Courtenay had a brilliant talent which could have enabled him escape his roots and reinvent himself - yet he chose not to. Some kind sense of duty to family, roots and class, added to which perhaps a natural cussedness, stopped him doing what many others would have done. It mirrors his character's decision at the end of the film - to stay true his roots, not to sell out. Its Courtnay's performance which gives coherence to the story and lifts the film out of the ordinary. Had Courtenay not been cast, this film would have been forgotten.
Stylistically the film is both determined by - and suffers from - being a kind of confluence of currents that were modish at, and somewhat before, the time of its making. There is at times cinema verite wobbly/blurred camera-work and improvisational-sounding dialogue, a working class kitchen sink setting and something of the angst of "Look back in Anger" (but of a griping resentful sort rather than John Osborne's explosive and searingly honest kind). It is then a kind of marriage - but not one made in Heaven, more the other place. The treatment of class-conflict (the bringing together of the public school youths and their opposite numbers from the "approved school" (reform school) in an athletic competition is a complete damp squib (compare Lindsay Anderson's "If" for example), no point at all appears to be made.
Why then was this film so well received? Deeply attached to his family and North of England working class roots, Courtenay had a brilliant talent which could have enabled him escape his roots and reinvent himself - yet he chose not to. Some kind sense of duty to family, roots and class, added to which perhaps a natural cussedness, stopped him doing what many others would have done. It mirrors his character's decision at the end of the film - to stay true his roots, not to sell out. Its Courtnay's performance which gives coherence to the story and lifts the film out of the ordinary. Had Courtenay not been cast, this film would have been forgotten.