Cinema: Borstal Boycott

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, a piece of skillful but specious pleading for the British proletariat, ominously suggests that the battles of World War III may be lost on the playing fields of her Majesty’s reform schools.

Expanded from a short story by Alan Sillitoe, Loneliness recites the lugubrious case history of a mill-town ragamuffin (Tom Courtenay) who winds up as a Borstal boy. As he reaches reform school, the hero is met by “the Guv’nor” (Michael Redgrave). “You’re here to work hard and play hard,” his nibs announces with an intolerably self-righteous smirk. “We’re here to try and make something of you.”

We, it turns out, are a rogues’ gallery of stupid, brutal and arrogant attendants. In self-defense the hero tries to decide who he is and what made him that way. A succession of sometimes awkward flashbacks shows a dismal flat in a dismal slum, a father dying of some unspeakable capitalist contagion, a mother playing around with her “fancy man,” a burglary of no more importance than a raid on the cookie jar, a relentless agent of the law who brings the hero to what the picture plainly does not think is justice. In the end, given the chance to win his freedom by winning a big race for the greater glory of the Guv’nor, the lad leads the way right up to the finish line—and stops. Why? Because he suddenly makes up his mind that if he has to play the game according to the rotten inhuman rules laid down by The Establishment, he would rather not play at all.

Unfortunately, the hero is too palpably prolier-than-thou, his case is too obviously rigged. Fortunately, Actor Courtenay is excellent (TIME, Sept. 14). As he plays the hero, his chest is phthisical, his voice is a noise among incessant city noises, his face is as hard and blank as city pavement, his eyes are as dark and empty as broken windows in an abandoned mill.