His only fun comes from sex and booze or getting his own back on a nosey neighbour by shooting her with an air gun, or putting a rat on a work colleague’s bench. When he takes a beating from some squaddies, set on him by his cuckolded workmate, he even accepts it philosophically.
Everything is relentlessly downbeat. Reisz captures the factories, the smoke, the narrow back alleys, the washing lines and the sense of being trapped in a ghetto. Almost sixty years later and factories are not so commonplace. Yet, in the workplace, we’re still told what to do. Circumstances might have changed, yet, for many, the script remains the same.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning marked the first film in which an ordinary working man’s life is viewed realistically. We don’t exactly like Arthur Seaton. He’s a bit too crude and brash. But working-class cinemagoers saw someone with whom they could identify. Finney was the guy you saw downing six pints on a Friday night, heading to the chippie or to the riverbank. He’s mouthy, sweaty and uncouth, someone you hope your nice daughter would not meet in the pub. Yet, as Melvyn Bragg once said, interviewing Finney in 1996, Seaton was ‘someone we all knew’.
The film was also a milestone, not just to the ‘ordinary’ cinema-going public but also to future actors from modest backgrounds. If Finney could portray a working-class guy and become so famous, there was hope for them. Years later, the likes of Ray Winstone, Malcolm McDowell and Pete Postlethwaite3 mentioned the impact of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.4 Similar ‘rebels’ followed, notably Michael Caine in Alfie, as well as movies like Up the Junction depicting the divide between posh and poor London. But Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was the original – much imitated, even parodied, but never bettered. Finney never sets a foot wrong. Seaton, for all his failings, was someone to be reckoned with. He is a survivor, if nothing else.
The Times caught the film’s appeal, ‘There is much to dislike in Arthur but Albert Finney and Mr Sillitoe never allow him to become negative; he stands for something, however vague and vulgar it may be, and is prepared to fight for it.’ The reviewer noted the social change afoot, ‘Here, as in Look Back in Anger and Room at the Top, is evidence of the desire to move away from the normal run of screen heroes and show the man at the lathe in his attempts to come to terms with contemporary society.’ Moving away indeed!
Shooting on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which had a modest budget of £120,000 of which £2,000 went to Finney, came in on schedule. For Finney, carrying his first big film, the load was enormous. He would sometimes throw up in the mornings. Yet what appeared on film was seamless, aided by an evocative Johnny Dankworth score.
The producers originally wanted Diana Dors to play Brenda but Britain’s ‘blonde bombshell’ allegedly withdrew because Brenda has an abortion, a storyline that reminded Dors of her own past. As for Shirley Anne Field, in retrospect she felt that her role in The Entertainer, in which she co-starred as one of Archie Rice’s conquests, was a screen test.
Filming in Nottingham was a joy, Field recalled during a visit to the city in 2012 for a photographic exhibition inspired by the movie:
We got straight off our train and checked into a hotel called The Court, which was very comfortable. The director, Karel Reisz, sat us down and we all had tea and poached eggs on toast. We were full of optimism because we felt we were breaking the mould with Alan Sillitoe’s story – making something special of working-class people; making them and their accents sexy. When you think about it, British working-class people were always portrayed in a rather patronising way.5
Shirley and Finney had already met when they were doing The Entertainer and had begun rehearsals for Lindsay Anderson’s The Lily White Boys when filming started. She thought Arthur Seaton was a terrific character:
I think what he did was so marvellous. You could see that his parents had been beaten down by the system, but he wasn’t going to be, and neither was she going to be. Remember the last scene where he throws the stone and Doreen asks him ‘why did you do that’? And he says: ‘it won’t be the last one I throw’?
Filming wrapped at the end of 1959 under a veil of secrecy. The idea was to release it quickly, without fanfare, and get tills ringing and critics’ tongues wagging. But even Reisz was unprepared for the sensational opening at Leicester Square’s Warner Cinema. ‘It got its money back after two weeks which scared the shit out of us,’ he recalled.
By the time the film came out, Finney was well into his run of Billy Liar. In February 1961, the Variety Club of Great Britain voted him most promising newcomer of 1960.
Bosley Crowther in the New York Times said that Arthur was portrayed fascinatingly by Finney. Crowther saw Seaton’s character, perhaps overlooking his startling nonconformity, as a macho youth. He described him as ‘a comforting relief from the devious, self-pitying rogues and weaklings we have seen in a lot of modern-day films’. Seaton is a:
… tough, robust, cheeky factory worker [who] gripes about his low pay and harsh foreman and spends his Saturday night drinking beer in the pub. Sure, he is sceptical and surly, sarcastic and rebellious towards certain things [but] he has confidence and a quiet determination. He can stand on his own two feet in the world.
Stanley Kauffmann was perhaps slightly closer to the truth when he wrote that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was ‘one of the best [films] of the movement, the only one that faces certain emotional implications for the present-day working-class’.
Kauffmann then put his own political spin on the character:
Better factory conditions and full employment and the National Health Service have given him armour against poverty and the threat of discharge but he is shrewd enough to see that these benefits have sapped the dynamism of the working class, made them relatively resigned and, in a sense, put gilded locks on the class barriers. Naturally he is not against the improvement per se; he is against the implicit attitude, on the part of both workers and bosses, that now they ought to be content with their lot.
If you see Seaton through a political paradigm – and I don’t think we should – Kauffmann implied that Seaton was wise enough to see that the social benefits that came hand in hand with exploitation were designed to keep the working class in line. The Times, perhaps unsurprisingly, thought that attempts to label Seaton a communist were also misplaced: ‘Anyone less of a communist than Arthur it’s difficult to imagine – he stands for individual protest, for the right to rebel against laws.’
Seaton was probably misappropriated for serial causes. He would have been a rebel under any system. He was a perennial mischief-maker, looking after number one. What would he do if he won the pools? ‘I’d see the family was taken care of. Then I’d make a bonfire of begging letters,’ he says at one point.
Finney recalled that the film meant that ‘working-class subjects were taken seriously which wasn’t a very strong British cinematic tradition and I was aware of that to some extent’. That was the key breakthrough. Also controversial was the movie’s graphic depiction of extramarital sex. Finney, speaking in 1982, recalled the upset:
A lot of people were outraged when the film came out. They thought it went too far. They thought the world was going to end because I’d been to bed with a married woman who was not my wife. There was a lot of trouble over it. And Karel got an enormous number of letters saying how disgusting it was. And, in terms of the sex, the law then was that you had to have one foot on the floor, like in snooker. I think that Room at the Top, which came out a couple of years earlier, was the first film that kind of intimated that two consenting adults have actually done something in bed together. There was a great discussion about whether I should keep my vest on, my ringlet, or whether Rachel Roberts’s slip should be seen. I can’t remember the results. It was 1960 and these great debates were taking place.
Finney also remembered:
I was totally engrossed in the film and I really enjoyed working with Karel. I also found film acting very interesting. It took ten weeks plus two weeks of second unit work. I
found that it really does take over and that you’re obsessed with it. I quite enjoyed that. In film you try to get a breath of life.
He intimated that it was easier to do that on-screen than in theatre.
The movie was a smash hit. The only downer was that people could not differentiate between the actor and the character of Arthur Seaton. Finney said he was different:
I don’t think I’m like that [Seaton] at all. I feel that I’m much more inhibited and quieter. If a person like Arthur stood next to me in a bar and I overheard the scene like when he picks up the girl in the film, I’d feel a bit embarrassed. And I’d move away and let him get on with it because I’d feel – oh, men do that, do they? This is how they behave. I’m much quieter, much shyer. I don’t drink very much. I can’t take it … I was attracted to play someone like that because I’m not like that.
To which we might respond, ‘Nice try, Albert!’ Perhaps he doth protest too much. He might not have been Arthur Seaton, but he was no introvert either.
In 1960, Finney told Robert Robinson that he always believed that the character should stand in front of him, not the other way around:
They’ve seen my performance in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and they think that’s me – that’s my personality. I feel very strongly that audiences should realise that what you’re presenting to them is sort of like the work of a potter. You’re showing the way, illustrating the way you make the pottery and revealing it to the audience through the marriage of instinct and emotions.
In 1962, he told John Freeman that ‘something in me hates the selling of an image to the public, that to sell a product you say this is what he does: he gets drunk, he shoots guns at fat ladies. I felt imprisoned by the feeling of being seen as a north country youth’.
But Finney had difficulties fighting public perception. In 1961, after the film’s release, Time profiled the 25-year-old. The magazine implied that, if Finney wasn’t a dead ringer for Arthur, he was certainly a restless nonconformist. It began by comparing him to Olivier. ‘Like Olivier, Finney is immensely versatile. But he has none of the smooth gloss of the classic acting tradition. He is relentlessly naturalistic, and his technique seldom shows on the surface.’ The focus then shifted to the private man. ‘He seldom spends more than two nights in the same flat, chain smokes, sometimes has kippers and champagne for breakfast.’
So Finney now had two tags to contend with, both with their pitfalls: the ‘new Olivier’ and the reprobate Arthur Seaton. It made him more determined to always go his own way.
5
LIFE CHOICES
Eager and pliant and marvellously sensitive with all his toughness and vitality.
Lindsay Anderson on Albert Finney.
Finney was still keen to work with Lindsay Anderson, the new wave director from whose play, The Long, the Short and the Tall he had left because of illness.
Their first joint venture was Harry Cookson’s The Lily White Boys. Class conflict was at the core. Finney, Monty Landis and Philip Locke played juvenile delinquents, while Georgia Brown, Ann Lynn and Finney’s co-star from Saturday Night, Shirley Anne Field, played their girlfriends. Various ‘respectable citizens’, all depicted as corrupt, litter the background.
It was Finney’s first musical and he later said he thought he had uncovered ‘a respectable baritone’ while belting out Christopher Logue’s lyrics at the Royal Court. A decade later, and the memory of Finney’s singing helped him secure the lead, and an eventual Golden Globe, in Scrooge.
Ann Lynn thought that The Lily White Boys had a strong left-wing message, ‘It was like a crusade, very socialist in content, decrying materialism and showing how most people fall into the trap of greed, which tends to happen on the backs of less fortunate people’. Anderson, like most other new wave directors, was someone of strong radical convictions. He adored Finney at this point. In rehearsals, early in January 1960, he noted:
Albert is a joy to work with, and without a talent as outstanding as his the show would be impossible. He is young, though, and in certain ways crystallised, too apt to ‘turn in’ and get away with it by brilliant naturalism. But he knows this – he is very intelligent about himself, and about theatre and he learns astonishingly fast.
As the rehearsals progressed, and they tackled some difficult numbers, Anderson’s opinion of Finney soared:
Pressing on with numbers; the quartet, Albie is getting it, though this is the most difficult one for him and gives rise to interesting speculations as to whether one needs to be a socialist in order to play this kind of satire satisfactorily. Certainly Albie is coming on tremendously – I mean developing his ideas and his self-confidence. He is so charming and pleasant to work with. Never a trace of egotism or refractoriness. Eager and pliant and marvellously sensitive with all his toughness and vitality.
But when the play opened, on 27 January 1960, the reviews were not ecstatic. ‘Its satire rests on the naïve assumption that all business men are crooks and that no business can be done without bribery, that all lawyers are thieves and so on,’ noted The Times. The reviewer went on to say, however, that Finney, Landis and Locke provided ‘vigorous and well contrasted’ performances.
Perhaps that is why Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, still awaiting release, would be so successful. It just illuminated the lives of ordinary people. Inevitably, in some similar productions, the upper classes become caricatures. With hindsight, it was easy to lampoon prime ministers like Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home on programmes like That Was the Week That Was.
The Lily White Boys ran for just forty-five performances. Yet the muted reception did not dent Anderson’s admiration for Finney. Looking back, the play was a dry run for what was to be their most famous collaboration – Billy Liar, a three-act play by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall.
Theatregoers in the eighties would know Waterhouse as the writer behind the staging of the hilarious drunken misadventures of Soho scribe Jeffrey Bernard. When Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell came out in 1989, Bernard was an obscure figure. Thanks to Waterhouse’s skill, this sad old sot, whose jottings were described as a suicide note in installments, became an unlikely hero.
Thirty years separate Billy Liar from Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, and the two plays were very different. But the style is somehow similar. In Bernard’s feverish storytelling we can see some of Billy Fisher’s wild fantasies. Billy was a terminally bored undertaker’s clerk. Any suggestion triggers endless daydreaming; he becomes a war hero, a fop and a successful businessman.
Billy was another working-class anti-hero but not nearly as belligerent as Seaton; he was diffident and introverted. After all, the extrovert seldom has recourse to a life of vivid fantasies. Both, it’s true, were northerners seeking escape. But whereas in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Finney had to project an unnatural aggression, Billy Liar called for him to downsize, to capitulate to a rollercoaster imagination.
In July 1960, Finney, Willis Hall and Lindsay Anderson did a little recce to Leeds as part of investigations for Billy Liar. Anderson described it as ‘two northerners, no-nonsense and colloquially rough spoken, and one upper-class southerner, intellectual type’. Anderson gives an intriguing behind-the-scenes glimpse into Finney ‘regressing’ into his down-to-earth Yorkshire persona – doing rather than analysing – leaving his intellectual director feeling excluded.
Finney was still anonymous at this stage. All that would change when Saturday Night and Sunday Morning opened. But, in the summer of 1960, Finney could still enter a pub or fish and chip shop unnoticed. He was not yet a star or, put another way, he was a star but the world hadn’t found out yet. This is Anderson’s account:
We went for a drink; first in one pub, then another. Mr Hall [Willis’s father] – fiftyish, round faced, spectacled, was almost as chatty as his son – pleasant enough but not exactly forthcoming. Willis and Albert talked about Yorkshire. The second pub was a small, ugly little room crammed with tired-looking, ugly little men swilling beer. I drank ligh
t ale. Willis bought half a dozen bottles and borrowed a pack of cards. When we got back Willis and Albert went off to buy fish and chips, while Mr Hall brewed tea. We ate. Then the cards came out. Did I play pontoon? I said no. No effort of course was made to initiate me. They started to play. It was about eleven o’clock I suppose.
I could have forecast the rest of the night … they just played … of course, fate would plan just the kind of situation for me that I am least able to cope with. A situation of exclusion. Stranded in a world I had no relationship with … rather aggressively male … with no time to spare for the sentimentalisms of relationships, for the arts or speculation or conversation, or for politeness, hospitality or charm.
In other words, sensitive southern intellectual feels out of place among the people whose causes he espouses, but also, perhaps significantly, the young Finney, on the crest of major stardom, pulled between two worlds. Few northerners would sit down and analyse their feelings, or articulate in any way ‘the entrapment of the working class’. These were for directors like Anderson to explore.
Billy Liar opened on 13 September 1960 at the Cambridge Theatre. It was an immediate critical and box office success. It played for nearly 600 performances, including Finney and – subsequently – Courtenay’s appearances. It also spawned a film (making stars out of Courtenay and Julie Christie), a stage musical and a TV series. The Times raved about the play:
Albert Finney keeps us constantly interested in both the outer and inner workings of the hero’s mind … In a little scene in a night garden Finney crowns his performance with an extraordinary deft series of imaginings, beginning with the struttings of a drum major and ending with an impressive rendering of the Last Post.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning opened during the run. The press caught the whiff of double success before the premiere and interviewed Finney while he was appearing in Billy Liar. Finney did not attend the film’s premiere. ‘It’s rather marvellous that I’ve got the play to do tonight. It’s all come in a lump. I don’t like first nights at all. I don’t like the feeling that it’s not yours anymore,’ he said.
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