Cinema: Saxon Revolt

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning [Woodfall; Continental). “I’m me and nobody else. Whatever people say I am. that’s what I’m not. Because they don’t know a bloody thing about me. I’m a six-foot prop that wants a pint o’ beer, that’s what.” With this Teddy-boyish declaration of grog-on-ice independence, the “Saxon Revolt” that is currently burning up the grass roots of British literature breaks out with brawling and exhilarant abandon on the screen. Adapted by Alan Sillitoe from his rumbustiously original first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is easily the best British movie since Room at the Top—a loud, hilarious, indignant, contented, malodorous belch of prosperous protest from the British working class. What’s more, in Albert Finney (TIME, Feb. 24), the picture introduces a fiery young (24) larrikin Olivier of singular charm and histrionic talent—at the moment the most brilliant actor of his age in the English-speaking world.

Finney plays the part of Arthur Seaton, a machinist in a Midlands mill who slaves away at the lathe all week, but on Saturday night it’s down to the pub for a glorious case of the screaming ab-dabs. After putting away ten pints of beer, Arthur falls blissfully down a flight of stairs, staggers home with a friend’s wife (Rachel Roberts), wakes up next morning just in time to walk out the front door as the friend walks in the back. Off to a bar, he spots a little bit of all right (Shirley Anne Field), makes a date for picture night, spends the rest of Sunday fishing and elaborating his philosophy of love: “Marriage costs too much. A lump sum down and yer wages a week for life. Nobody’s got to marry ’em to get ’em. Not if they’re already married.”

A week later the friend’s wife announces that she is pregnant, the hero is the fa ther, and they had better “bring it off” damn quick. An amateurish abortion at tempt fails. The husband twigs. His broth er and another big swaddie catch Arthur in the dark and wallop the living tabs off him. But a week later the young dog is out of bed again and rolling all over the parlor floor with that pretty little tuffey-apple he met in the bar. Will he marry her? Maybe. Will he stop fighting? “Ever see where not fighting gets yer?”

As Arthur hollers it, this is a call to revolution. But Arthur is the natural (as opposed to the political) revolutionary. He is the man in love with life, the Nietzschean yeasayer who devours all ex perience, even the experience of a brutal beating, and finds it nourishing. Author Sillitoe has recognized and unforgettably defined a type. Actor Finney, under the keen direction of Karel Reisz, a gifted maker of documentary movies, embodies the type with remarkable vigor and exact ness. Finney’s strongest asset as an actor is his presence, an inward weight that holds the center of every scene, as the heaviest fish holds the bottom of a net. But he is also a grandly gifted mimic. His dullard eye and dirgelike stroke, as he rides his bike to work, present an ex erience as old as that of the fellah on the water wheel — the quiet desperation of the man who works for someone else. Best of all, he has the rare intensity of talent that seems to transform every atom of Finney into an atom of Arthur.

The same thing happens, though less intensely, in the case of Actress Roberts. Both these performances are, in the deep est sense of the word, authentic. At its best moments, the film is authentic too, a stirring tribute to the yeoman spirit that still seems to survive in the “dark Satan ic mills” and redbrick eternities of working life in England. After 900 years, if Sillitoe is right, the Saxons are still unconquered.