GREAT BRITAIN: KITCHEN SINK CINEMA

As Italy had cultivated the spaghetti Westerns, British filmmaking responded to the decline in filmgoing by creating new sorts of films. Hammer Films, a small indepen-

20.43 The image of one of the terrified victims in Peeping Tom is partially projected on the protagonist as he stands before the cinema screen.

Dent production company, rose to prominence with a series of internationally popular horror films. Many were loose remakes of 1930s Universal films, including Drac-ula (aka The Horror of Dracula, 1958, Terence Fisher) and The Mummy (1959, Terence Fisher). Gorier than their predecessors, they also boasted polished production values, including elegant color cinematography (Color Plate 20.3).

The horror vogue paved the way for one of the most unusual films of this period, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1959). Although it was not produced by Hammer, its scriptwriter had worked there. It concerned a shy young assistant cinematographer, who is also a psychotic killer, making 16mm films of his female victims in their death throes. Since Powell had codirected some of the most prestigious films of the postwar era, such as The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death (see Chapter 17), critics could not fathom why he should take on this sordid tale. Yet Peeping Tom explores the roots of sexual violence with a complexity unusual for its time, presciently linking child abuse to the victim’s later crimes. It also raises the question of how the film medium itself arouses erotic impulses (20.43).

If horror films constituted one of the most distinctive portions of the mainstream cinema, the “Kitchen Sink” trend (so-called for its depiction of grubby, everyday life) was Britain’s equivalent of the French New Wave. Its principal directors emerged out of the Free Cinema group (p. 480).

During the mid-1950s, plays and fiction centering on rebellious working-class protagonists created a classconscious, “angry-young-man” trend. The most important of these works was John Osborne’s play Look Back

20.44,  left Like many Kitchen Sink films, Look Back in Anger stresses the grim industrial landscapes that surround the characters.

20.45,  right The opening scene of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning shows the protagonist at work, as we hear his voice speaking over: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down; that’s one thing I’ve learned.”

20.46,  left The hero of This Sporting Life in a rare cheerful interlude, playing with his lover’s son as she looks on. Kitchen Sink films often contrast the peace of the countryside with the oppression of the industrialized city.

20.47,  right Tom Jones turns and asks the audience if they saw his landlady pick his pocket.

In Anger, directed on the stage by Tony Richardson in 1956. In 1959, Richardson and others formed a production company, Woodfall, in order to move from the documentary shorts of Free Cinema into feature filmmaking.

One of the first Woodfall films was an adaptation of Look Back in Anger (1959) starring Richard Burton. The alienated hero runs a candy stall in an open-air market and rants to his mates about the injustices of the class system. His best friend is his elderly landlady, whom he accompanies on a visit to her husband’s grave (20.44). Like other films of this tendency, Look Back in Anger's sober realism owes a good deal to location shooting.

Although Look Back in Anger was a commercial failure, another Woodfall film made at the same time, and released shortly before it, did well at the box office. Room at the Top (1959, Jack Clayton) was adapted from a novel about a cynical working-class hero who marries a factory owner’s daughter in order to better his lot. Dwelling on the disillusionment of life in Britain’s provincial cities, Room at the Top was unusual in its sexual frankness and its depiction of class resentment.

Perhaps the quintessential film of the Kitchen Sink trend is Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Arthur deeply resents his factory job and his passive parents (20.45), yet at the end he and his fiancee stand staring at a suburban housing development, a shot suggesting that they face the same dreary life.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was based on an Alan Sillitoe novel, and he adapted his short story for Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance

Runner (1962), the story of a sullen prisoner in a reform school who trains as a cross-country runner. Like other angry-young-man films, Loneliness uses techniques borrowed from the French New Wave, including fast motion to suggest excitement during the hero’s crimes and hand-held camerawork for scenes of his exhilarating open-air jogging. In an echo of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Loneliness ends with a freeze-frame as the boys assemble gas masks.

Lindsay Anderson, like the Cahiers du cinema directors, had been a film critic, and he lambasted the British cinema for its stodgy refusal to face contemporary life. His first feature, This Sporting Life (1963), takes as its protagonist a miner who tries to become a professional rugby player while carrying on a troubled affair with his landlady (20.46). Anderson indicts capitalist society through the corrupt sports promoters whom the hero encounters.

Kitchen Sink cinema was a short-lived trend. This Sporting Life failed, and the unexpected success of another, very different Woodfall film swerved filmmakers in new directions. Turning away from harsh realism, Richardson adapted a classic British comic novel in Tom Jones (1963), tapping Osborne for the screenplay. Backed by United Artists, the big-budget color film borrowed heavily from the French New Wave (20.47). It became a huge hit and won several Academy Awards.

Turning from working-class life in the industrial cities, filmmakers began to attach themselves to the vogue for portraying the lifestyle of “swinging London.” English clothes and British rock and roll were suddenly

20.48 Morgan imagines his execution in a junkyard decorated with pictures of famous Marxists.

Fashionable, and London came to be seen as the capital of trendiness, social mobility, and sexual liberation. A series of films probing the shallowness of the “mod” lifestyle found success in art theaters around the world.

For example, in Darling (1965, John Schlesinger) a thoughtless, trivial model rises in society through a string of love affairs and finally marries an Italian prince. Darling uses many techniques derived from the Nouvelle Vague, such as jump cuts and freeze-frames. Alfie (1966, Lewis Gilbert) offers a male reversal of Darling, in which a selfish charmer seduces a series of women, ducking all problems until confronted with the illegal abortion of one of his victims. Alfie follows Tom Jones in letting the hero share his thoughts with the viewer by means of asides to the camera.

Reisz’s Morgan, a Suitable Case for Treatment

(1966) joined the working-class hero of the Kitchen Sink period with a comic critique of swinging London. A man from a Marxist family tries desperately to prevent his wife from divorcing him and marrying a snobbish art-gallery owner. Morgan assimilates art-cinema conventions in its fantasy scenes, in which the hero compares people to gorillas and envisions his execution (20.48).

Apart from the new prominence of the London lifestyle, creative talents left Kitchen Sink realism behind. The success of Tom Jones led Richardson to Hollywood, while Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, Richard Harris, and Michael Caine became international stars. Hollywood’s tactics in financing British films changed as well. The intimate, realistic film would often be associated with a more overtly political cinema, while many notable later British works were either expensive prestige films (often made with American backing) or inventive genre pictures.