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The 'Loneliness' of the Angry Young Sportsman
- Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies
- Center for the Study of Film and History
- Volume 35.2 (Spring 2005)
- pp. 41-48
- 10.1353/flm.2005.0041
- Article
- Additional Information
Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 35.2 (2005) 41-48
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The 'Loneliness' of the Angry Young Sportsman
John Hughson
Introduction
The war between the classes has never been joined in British films as openly as it was this week. In the forties the working class were idiom-talking idiots, loyal or baleful. In the fifties they grew rightly articulate and angry. Now we get what may be the prototype for the sixties: Colin Smith, borstal boy hero of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, a youth beyond anger, almost beyond speech, joining battle.
So wrote the Sunday Telegraph film critic P. Williams in a review of the Tony Richardson film of aforementioned title upon its British cinema release in September 1962. The film—based on the 1959 novella of same name by Alan Sillitoe (the screenplay for the film version was also written by Sillitoe)—was produced by the independent film company Woodfall, started by Richardson and playwright John Osborne as an avenue for the making of films affording 'artistic control' to directors. According to Richardson, 'It is absolutely vital to get into British films the same sort of impact and sense of life that what you can loosely call the Angry Young Man cult has had in the theatre and literary worlds' (Hill, 1986: 40).
Click for larger view | Figure 1 The Lonliness of the Long Distance Runner in paperback Courtesy of www.theprisonfilmproject.com |
This paper examines The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, a key film within the extension of the Angry Young Man 'genre' to British cinema in the early 1960s. Of particular interest is the film's portrayal of the tension between class background and individualistic temperament through sport in both metaphoric and lived institutional contexts. This paper commences with a discussion of Sillitoe's work within the Angry Young Man literary genre before moving on to consider the emergence of Angry Young Men within film, once the novels of Sillitoe and other related writers were translated into screenplays. The paper goes on to consider the rather unique location of sport within the film, and attempts to tease out the implications of the treatment and depiction of sport for relevant discussion of the film by sport and film historians and cultural historians more generally.
Looking back at 'angry young men'
The term Angry Young Man was originally applied to John Osborne, by the English Stage Company publicist George Fearon, following the 1956 stage release of Look Back in Anger (Rebellato, 1999: 116). This was to associate Osborne with the key protagonist in the play, Jimmy Porter, an articulate yet highly disgruntled young man who relentlessly lambastes what he perceives as social hypocrisy in a series of vituperative tirades delivered within his own living room. The term Angry Young Man was subsequently associated with a number of young male writers whose works featured opinionated and sometimes belligerent lead characters. Most of the characters are working class in background and invariably dissatisfied with their lot in life. Some, particularly Joe Lampton in John Braine's Room at the Top, are socially ambitious and seek upward mobility on the British class ladder. Others tend to hyper-frustration and despite possessing facility for sharp criticism are unable to transcend their working class milieu. Such is the case with the characters in Alan Sillitoe's two best-known works Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Arthur Seaton) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Colin Smith).
Although dissatisfied and restless, neither Arthur Seaton nor Colin Smith exhibits the inclination to shake their class moorings. Indeed, they exhibit class fixity balanced in tension between a sense of belonging—a begrudging class loyalty—and a feeling of suffocation. Their escape from the working class is not up the class ladder but an imagined or realised trip to the country or seaside. In the film version of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner Colin Smith visits the east England coastal town Skegness...
