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Cinema, probably since its inception, and certainly since James Agate first wrote about it in 1921, has been divisible into two categories: cinema that is a commercial proposition, and cinema that is art. The two have on occasion overlapped, but the distinction has usually been pretty clear.

     It is also clear that, as in any other medium, the number of films produced to make money is far greater than the number intended as art. But what one questions is why any country should be as deficient in artistic films as Britain was until two or three years ago. The usual explanation is that the star system, and the exigencies of commercial management, stifled whatever talent there was. This, however, is an argument that only takes you so far. ‘Where talent in other countries has existed, it has often found a way. In this country one might cite the two films Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, both directed by David Lean, to show how excellent ‘commercial’ films can be. The reasons for the moribundity of English cinema are perhaps debatable. Perhaps they stemmed at large from our refusal to relinquish the saleable idea of ourselves as a bowler-hatted, well-dressed, dryly witty, middle-class people, with our lower classes firmly relegated to the position of comic relief — a myth, incidentally, still perpetuated by the British Travel and Holidays Association ads. Whatever the reason, we have been beset long enough by an unselective array of larkish medical students, superannuated policemen, tired admirals and sportive lawyers — all hell bent to drive us Further Up the Creek. And this on the lighter side; Drama has propelled us chiefly into the precincts of the inadequate and repetitive thriller, in which one of three or four well-known personalities has featured as the canny, pipe-smoking inspector, combating a preposterously old-fashioned underworld and a welter of murderous cliché.

     It is only in very recent years that certain directors have forced a way through this rabble, and re-established claims for the cinema as art. ‘Which director and which film was actually first responsible is a matter difficult to decide. On the stage, what one might call the arrival of the modem world was clearly marked by the opening night of a single play, Look Back In Anger at the Royal Court. In the cinema, the infiltration has been more gradual, not to say tardy, but there is now at least a handful of intelligent films, which constitute if anything does Britain’s reply to the rashes of talent that have recently invaded us from Italy and France. The best of them, in terms of cinema, is also the most recent — Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, adapted from the novel by Alan Sillitoe. I suspect that most people who read the original and saw the film preferred the film. If so, this was doubtless due to the creation of authentic characters and authentic places by Karel Reisz. The realism of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, film version, was a far more delicate and better observed thing than it was in the novel. And since the realism was about ninety-nine per cent of the point in both cases, it follows that the degree of it achieved was of supreme importance. One of Sillitoe’s defects is that he has no ear — no fine ear, no mimic’s ear, that is. Reading the conversations of his characters, one sees only Sillitoe engaged in writing them. Too many things in the book, in fact, have the air of a working-class childhood not quite well enough remembered in the tranquillity of later years. Reisz, possibly because he is nearer in spirit to his subject, avoids any such forced quality. His eye is surer, his ear keener and his hand firmer. He makes his people live (aided by the fact that they are all fine actors), sets them in surprisingly real surroundings (surprising only in the cinema that is; we see such people and places every day), and loses the more extraneous and unconvincing aspect of Sillitoe’s story, like the dreary abortion and the opening incident where the drunken hero vomits over the bourgeoisie. We had already had an indication of Karel Reisz’s handling of working-class subjects in We Are the Lambeth Boys, a study of a youth club in the East End. The film was perhaps most remarkable for its spontaneity — the way it captured the essence of the young lives it portrayed — and coming when it did, for pioneering in English cinema a taste for uncompromising realism.

     The film of Room at the Top had at least two things in common with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: brilliant acting from its star performer (for whom, unfortunately, no English claims can be made), and the conviction it left behind that the film version improved upon the novel. And for similar reasons. It was difficult to believe in Braine’s Joe Lampton as much beyond a symbol, still more to accept the phony bunch of provincial sophisticates with whom he fell in. Moreover the message — the impossibility of squaring your conscience with the realities of reaching t’top — was rather too baldly stated and called to mind unfavourable parallels with the hero of Le Rouge et le Noir. On the screen Lampton approached becoming credible living flesh. One could believe that he had left a world of bombed sites and stone sinks and back-to-back houses, not only for the dimly luxurious status symbols of Conservative Club and gracious home, but also for a glimpse of passion and tenderness—the real satisfactions that his spirit craved. The relationship between Lampton and Alice, again with its parallels in Saturday Night, was one of the most mature, unselfconscious and unpuritanical relationships that the normally puritanico-prurient English cinema had produced for a long time, and did a lot to redeem the tritely virginal role of Heather Sears at the other corner of the triangle. The film as a whole conveyed a particular and modern situation, completely relevant to the present time, but with the general implications that lie behind all art.

     With the film adaptations of The Entertainer and Look Back In Anger our gratitude for something else on the screen that meant something was more than tinged with reserve. The Entertainer was, in any case, never a particularly good play. It served chiefly as a vehicle for some good characterization, some memorable Osborne, and for Olivier’s tour de force, the technicalities of which were perhaps more suited to stage than screen. The film of Look Back In Anger proved that it is not only pointless to show Jimmy actually at the jazz club, the sweet stall or the bedside of Ma Tanner; it is definitely harmful to do so. For one thing, the provoking force of Jimmy’s personality is lost once it leaves that claustrophobic one-room set. And for another, the significance of much of what Jimmy says is in the way John Osborne makes him say it. And the same effect is by no means gained by photographing in actuality half of what he talks about, however beautiful the lighting effects, and chopping the rest into petulant little bits. There is a current mania for transferring literary successes into every possible medium, which at its worst excess resulted in ‘The Daily Express’ version of the book of the film of the play of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. It may be that many plays lose their meaning when the emphasis is shifted from the eye to the ear, and needless perambulation is introduced. If this is true of Look Back In Anger, it is equally true of The Long and the Short and the Tall, another play considerably weakened by transfer to the screen. That such loss of meaning is not inevitable might be shown by Julius Caesar, or even by Twelve Angry Men. But it requires more self-control and a finer appreciation of how the essentials of a play can be expressed in filmic terms than most of our directors have acquired.

     In spite of the high incidence of failure, one welcomes the transference from the stage of anything with leanings towards the worthwhile. Themes written originally as screenplays which have anything of the contemporary playwright’s concern for ideas are few and far between. The best to appear so far was The Angry Silence with its setting in a factory which actually looked like a factory, and its at least attempted investigation of a contemporary conflict between trades-union-mindedness (here synonymous with bloodymindedness) and the rights of the individual. The atmosphere of the film was genuine, many of its details surprisingly valid (the Teddy boys, the tearaway on the motor bike making his routine seductions on Sunday afternoons, the willing-to-be-led quality of the men), and the language, if selfconsciously overloaded with exhortations to ‘get stuffed’ and ‘get knotted’, gave the feeling of belonging to the present time. The chief failing of the film was a certain slickness, culminating in the cops and robbers solution at the end. There was also a certain naiveté in the motivations behind the strike, shouldering much of the blame on to a shadowy Communist infiltrator as clumsy and inflexible as much of Marxist jargon. I’m All Right, Jack, which dealt with a similar theme, attempted satire of both managerial manipulation and the men’s stubborn unionism. This unselectiveness was unfortunate. The film slung its arrows from no particular standpoint, and succeeded consequently, through the performance of Peter Sellers as the shop steward, more on a comic plane than a satirical one. It was different only in degree, not in kind, from the now lapsed tradition of English comedy, and implied in a stronger way only the same sort of criticisms of industry as, say, Private’s Progress had of the army.

     Our other attempt at satire, Expresso Bongo, though limitedly acclaimed on stage for its exposé of the pop song business, suffered from acute heavy-handedness, and also from a chummy quality around the satire that one felt was included to captivate maximum audiences. Satire, clearly, in British films has a long way to go, perhaps because satire requires the taking of aspects of behaviour to extremes, whereas so often the extremes are already present in everyday life. It takes a fine process of selection, as well as a deft wit, to bring home the enormity of much of what we take for granted.

     In a review of recent ‘serious’ films in Britain one cannot avoid mentioning the screen version of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, although one does so with reluctance and only to point the film out as a hopelessly lost opportunity. It reduced Lawrence’s book to pretentious banality, with dialogue that was stilted and insincere, and the whole invested with the worst kind of fake ‘artistic’ significance. Who can believe, to begin with, in Paul Morel who is a carefully enunciating American? Who would not regret that his fixation for his mother was of the same order and intensity as that which might be expressed in the average Mothers’ Day card?

     Among the films being planned or in the production stage are adaptations of Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Alun Owen’s No Trams to Lime Street, John Mortimer’s Act of Mercy, Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. How successful these will be in adding to the bulwarks of British film awaits to be seen.

     Now one of the predominant things about the films I have just listed is their preoccupation with working-class life. This fact, in the light of contemporary trends in the novel and the drama, is not surprising. But it is a factor which limits considerably the relatively small output of serious British films. The validity of working-class realism in literature is sufficiently established now for there to be no point in reiterating its merits, merits perhaps too often reiterated since Look Back In Anger took the theatre by storm. A position more or less to the left of centre is now the norm for the intelligentsia, bred of whatever class. And criticisms of working-class plays and films have tended to stem chiefly from writers like Noel Coward who refuse to accept that their period is over. And yet there remains considerable room for doubt about the efficacy of a cinema whose main preoccupation is with the working-class alone. For one thing, it is often over-concerned with proselytizing and the kind of unrewarding idealism to be found in Arnold Wesker’s Roots. For another, it is a mistake to assume that any particular class of society (allowing for the moment that society is divided by class) holds a prerogative of great or small dramatic truths. Yet again, it is simply monotonous.

     Since the reaction at the moment is against artificiality and the middle-class, there is also a tendency to regard the use of realism and the working-class as an end in itself, instead of as the raw materials for creating something. This is a feeling we get particularly from Karel Reisz’s films. Both Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and We Are the Lambeth Boys depicted slices of life which, though sensitively and sympathetically observed, invited the final critical response, ‘So what?’ The director’s attitude towards his characters is by implication one of unquestioning benevolence. He is, in fact, selling us the working-class. This is one of the limitations of proselytizing. It demands of the audience the same kind of uncritical admiration for the hero as does Truffaut in Les Quatre Cents Coups. Reisz himself obviously has this admiration. But it means that he cannot see when the hero is being silly (as in the shooting of Ma Bull), or objectionable (as when he pours his beer over the other inhabitants of the pub), or disloyal (as he is when he abandons his married girl-friend when she get pregnant). In We Are the Lambeth Boys all the boys are heroes, in this sense, so that we have no reasonable kind of critical comment about them, only this vague benevolence. For instance, we are shown the boys at a discussion group, debating certain topical subjects. Are we to take this as necessarily a good thing, i.e., because it teaches them something, or develops their personalities, or allows them an opportunity for mental exercise otherwise denied them? Or is it futile because they lack the knowledge, or even the interest in knowledge, to derive much from such discussions?

     The preoccupation with the working-class is perhaps more due to the reaction against the artificialities and snobberies of middle-class art in the previous generation than to the working-class origins of its creators, since many of them are now at least familiar with other classes. But reactions against prejudices bring about prejudices of their own, in this case the assumption that anything which is not working-class is either pointless, affected, evil or inbred. Several times in John Osborne’s plays and screenplays we meet this automatic intolerance of the non-working-class. Alison’s brother Nigel, ‘the straightbacked chinless wonder from Sandhurst’, is an example. Similarly in Room At The Top we have another caricature of public school ineffectualness in the fiancé. It is natural that young writers should attack the fatuous and futile aspects of the erstwhile dominating classes. And yet the impression they seek to give, that there are more fools per head among other classes than among the working-class, would be difficult to prove, and is not substantiated by simple mockery of superficial class characteristics. In any case, a view of life which vaunts one section of society at the expense of the rest must inevitably fail to suggest anything like the breadth and complexity of life as it actually is.

     It might at this stage be worth shifting the argument on to a positive plane. If working-class subjects are limiting, what are the alternatives? Could films as good as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning not be made about, say, a tycoon, the mistress of a man about town, a journalist, a failed architect, a king, a student, or even three bourgeois women? They could, of course, and have been respectively in Citizen Kane, Les Amants, La Dolce Vita, L’Avventura, Ivan the Terrible, Les Cousins and Waiting Women. In fact one has only to look abroad, particularly to France, to see the multiplicity of subjects from which films are made — films, moreover, that have every kind of relevance to contemporary life, and which come into that mysterious category of the film as art.

     Is there any reason why we should not have had a Dolce Vita over here? I can see none. The materials of aristocratic decadence, journalistic prying, religious chicanery and intellectual doubt exist as commonly here as in Italy. As for L’Avventura, Karel Reisz has shown sufficient virtuosity as a director to suggest that he might one day be capable of such a film, if only someone had thought of writing (or had the ability to write) about a group of rich and beautiful hedonists, who had no need to live by the sweat of their brow but were nonetheless human beings for that. The theme of Les Cousins, the destruction of a provincial boy by his sophisticated cousin, would have been a perfectly valid one in this country, except possibly that students are non grata just now, and could have given rise to a far more excellent film than Chabrol made of it. Why, to take American examples for a moment, should the themes of Citizen Kane or The Magnificent Ambersons be any more endemic to America than to Britain?

     Countless themes for films, and methods of treating them, aside from the working-class realism of Fellini’s La Strada or Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups, are prompted by a glance at what is happening or has happened abroad. Why have we no equivalent of the lyricism of Jean Renoir’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, or Louis Malle’s Les Amants? Why no preoccupation with the most awesome of contemporary themes, as in Hiroshima, Mon Amour or with the questions of intellectual freedom that we find in Inherit the Wind? Where, one might even ask, is our allegorical answer to The Seventh Seal, or our exquisite reply to the exquisite fantasies of Les Belles de Nuit? Where our period pieces like Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis? Where, even, our exhilarating and beautifully acted bits of nonsense like The African Queen?

     Perhaps to ask as much is to be ungrateful. The breakthrough of serious films has hardly yet had effect. But we have seen enough to know approximately where we are going, and it would be unfortunate if in twenty years’ time all our present preoccupations seemed as pointless and limited as many of those of the previous generation do now. Perhaps the thought has already occurred to some writers, those who like John Osborne and Robert Bolt are turning from current realism to period drama in the hope that, as Bolt said recently: ‘... by dropping four or five centuries I might be able to stop talking about thirty-one buses.’ Perhaps at this stage in the cinema too we may have to drop a few centuries before we can stop being totally preoccupied with the slag heaps, the factories, the back-to-back houses and all the other aspects of that unlovely industrial landscape.