LOOK BACK IN ANGER (66)

Directed by: Tony Richardson (1958)

Starring: Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, Mary Ure, Gary Raymond

The Pitch: A disenchanted young man amid the conformism of 50s England rails against the rigidity and prejudice of the world around him.

Theo Sez: The first of the Angry Young Man movies, from the archetypal Angry Young Man play - and, for all its virtues, instantly dated. Burton's Jimmy Porter is as irresistibly unreasonable a rebel as Brando's nihilistic biker in THE WILD ONE - he's not angry about anything, he just hates the System for being there (even his back-story, his beloved father's death, is a red herring : he's not bitter because he thinks Society killed his father, but because it echoes his father's own bitterness as he lay dying ; just the mere fact of being angry is enough for him). Unfortunately it's hard to sympathise with his alienation from a class-ridden society, knowing as we do that - due mostly to films like this one - that society was about to be turned on its head both culturally and (a few years later) politically, with Jimmy's brand of inverted snobbery very much in vogue, kitchen-sinks to the fore and a slew of films (A KIND OF LOVING, Richardson's own A TASTE OF HONEY) that are exclusively about working-class life. That leaves only the language as a good reason to watch the movie - which is a bit like saying that gambling is the only good reason to go to Vegas. It's not much of a film, with stagy bits and a dull, conventional ending, but John Osborne's fiery lines are deathless - even when it's just a case of Burton's rich melodic bark wrapping itself round some particularly choice bit of abuse, hurled by Jimmy at his long-suffering wife : "sycophantic, phlegmatic and pusillanimous!"