Look Back in Anger

Look Back in Anger will go down in history for leading British drama out of the drawing room and into the rooming house, for giving it a good shot of O'Neill-Miller-Williams influence, and for varying its genteel decorum with a rude, poignant intensity and a new relevance to both current and recurrent human concerns. But the analogous revolution for British movies has already been accomplished by Room at the Top, and the film version of John Osborne's play appears as a good piece of work in an established genre of sex-and-the-class-struggle movies.

Mr. Osborne's greatest distinction is his ability to write long, furious, bitterly hilarious monologues, using common speech in a new and corrosively expressive manner. In Nigel Kneale's screenplay, with "additional dialogue" by Mr. Osborne, the brillant, obscene rhapsodies that lit up the play have been ruthlessly cropped, in an attempt to meet the demands of what is always said to be a "visual medium," and nothing can compensate for this loss.

Otherwise, though the action has been sedulously (and sometimes clumsily) chopped up into various locales, the film is faithful to the spirit of its original. It is still about the social, marital, and personal maladjustment of a "working-class intellectual," a university-educated sweet-stall operator named Jimmy Porter. In his frequent periods of depression, Jimmy still has recourse to blowing his Dixieland trumpet, and when feeling good he still composes pseudo-music hall songs combining sex and sociology, one of which is entitled "Don't Be Afraid to Sleep with Your Sweetheart Just Because She's Better Than You."

Jimmy is a furious, destructive, viciously witty and deeply troubled young man (rather like Hamlet), with few concessions made to the sensibilities of a family audience; and yet (again like Hamlet) he elicits a paradoxical sympathy and respect. His subtle three-cornered relationship with his wife Alison and their friend Cliff is still credible and touching, though much less deeply probed than in the play.

(Mr. Osborne is widely regarded as a deplorable cynic and naysayer, but in Cliff, who plays a wise, calm, and modest Horatio to Jimmy's Hamlet, he has created a character who must be unique in modern drama: a handsome young man who lives with a married couple, tied to them both by the warmest affection, yet endowed with hot pants for neither.)

Even the faults of the movie are largely those of the play. Mr. Osborne believes, and tells us, that the difficulties in the Porter marriage are due to Alison's shortcomings as well as Jimmy's, but this is never embodied dramatically: she appears as a worn, long-suffering patsy for Jimmy's tirades, with no vices or bitcheries to balance his, and no problems except Jimmy. In their brief moments of loving communion, Mr. and Mrs. Porter like to pretend that he is a jolly super bear and she a bushy-tailed squirrel--an odd and embarrassing touch of A. A. Milne.

These essential difficulties are partly balanced by certain specifically cinematic excellences. Tony Richardson, the director, does fine atmospheric things with grubby streets pouring disconsolate rain, and the nerve-wracking, shouting bustle of a public market. On the other hand, he tends to hammer home his crises much too obviously, and he has not generally done well with his principals. They tend toward loud whispers, harsh, throaty low tones, and quick sharp short sudden utterances--a pattern that has become a movie cliche.

Richard Burton plays Jimmy perfectly straight, without the bitter elan and charm of Kenneth Haigh's stage performance. His approach to Jimmy's tirades is a bit too far on the heavy-breathing side for complete conviction, but he has a craggy, intense, remarkably expressive face. Mary Ure's Alison--a role which she created--is fragile, appealing, slightly vapid, and very, very blonde.

As a friend of hers, who begins by hating Jimmy, crumples into his arms with incredible rapidity when Alison leaves him, and considerately vacates his bed when Alison comes home, Claire Bloom seems understandably tentative in a role that Mr. Osborne never finished conceiving. Garry Raymond is quietly admirable as Cliff, and Dame Edith Evans, in a brief appearance, makes an old Cockney woman thoroughly Dickensian and lovable, striking almost too simple and cheerful a note in a perplexed and perplexing film.