A key British film. Alan Sillitoe's short novel was filmed in 1962 by Tony Richardson, mixing grim-oop-north location shooting and a flashback structure, with a wonderful aura of freedom as Borstal boy Tom Courtenay samples nature on cross-country training runs.
Its freewheeling style borrowed a little from the French new wave but came up with something very British - a forerunner and inspiration for Leigh, Loach and Alan Clarke. It was the first film role, as a new kind of anti-authority anti-hero, for the scrawny young Courtenay, gave an early role for James Bolam and provided glimpses of James Fox, John Thaw and Frank Finlay.
Sillitoe describes it as "an extended essay about integrity" and Courtenay ("I was absolutely not an angry young man") also provides pertinent comment on an exemplary DVD.
Sillitoe's more famous Saturday Night and Sunday Morning from two years earlier is simultaneously released. Both are spiky harbingers of Britain's 1960s social revolution.
