 Two of the key films of the British 'new wave', Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning (1960) and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962), were drawn
from works by the novelist Alan Sillitoe; in both cases he wrote the
screenplays. Saturday Night, adapted from his first novel (1958), was directed
by Karel Reisz, and Loneliness, from the title story of his first short story
collection (1959), by Tony Richardson.
With their proudly working-class heroes, downbeat northern realism and
aggressive class-consciousness, they brought a startlingly new element into
British cinema, where working-class characters had generally been portrayed as
criminals, buffoons, eeh-ba-gum whippet-owners or salt-of-the-earth cockneys.
The films also launched the careers of Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay.
On the strength of these, Sillitoe was widely predicted to become a major
creative force in British films. As it turned out, the rest of his career as a
screenwriter represented something of a dying fall.
He was born in Nottingham of working-class stock and - like the protagonist
of Saturday Night - worked for some years in the Raleigh bicycle factory. After
his national service in the RAF he took up full-time writing and was initially
classed as one of the 'Angry Young Men' of post-war British literature - a label
he always loathed.
Following the huge success of his first two books he published extensively:
fiction, non-fiction and poetry. But only three more of his books were adapted
for the screen, and none of them made much impact. His novel 'The General'
became Counterpoint (US, 1967), a far-fetched Gothic wartime drama starring
Charlton Heston. Sillitoe had no hand in the scripting of this, but he did
script The Ragman's Daughter (1972) from his own novel. Directed by Harold
Becker, it returned to the Nottingham realism of his early work but felt less
than convincing. His final screen work was a TV drama, 'Pit Strike' (tx.
22/9/1977), again from his own novel, which opened the BBC series of one-off
dramas, Premiere (1977-80).
Philip Kemp
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FILM & TV CREDITS
