In the sixties, the British cinema had its own "new wave" of fiction films which grew out of the Angry Young Man literature and the Free Cinema documentaries of the fifties. The stories were, as ever, about class, but now they were being told from the perspective of the working classes, and set against the realism of Britain's industrial backyard. Without Tony Richardson, Britain's New Cinema probably would not have been possible. An Oxford graduate, theater director, documentary filmmaker (Momma Don't Allow, 1955), and Sight and Sound film critic, he was to become central to the New Cinema movement as a director (Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, A Taste of Honey, and tonight's feature, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner), producer (of his own films as well as Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) and co-founder of Woodfall Films. After The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, however, Richardson turned away from the angry young men and toward the considerably funnier, absurd young men of Tom Jones and the uproarious cult classic The Loved One. A taste for the absurd also led to a Nabokov adaptation, Laughter in the Dark, followed by the memorable Hamlet with Nicol Williamson, The Border, with Jack Nicholson, and the bizarre adventures at Hotel New Hampshire. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner is a devastating portrait of a young man's turmoil and a virtuoso display of film technique in translating that inner state into exterior imagery. Tom Courtenay stars as Colin Smith, who lives with his dying father, his callous mother, and three screaming siblings in a cramped little house located somewhere between a rock and a hard place. Frustration erupts almost casually one night when he steals a cashbox from a bakery. He is sent to a boys' reformatory where the clichés that echo emptily about the outside world are institutionalized into a workaday program to create model citizens. The warden (Michael Redgrave), whose obsessive desire is to see his boys compete with public school lads on the cutting edge, sports, sees a winning ticket in Colin, a veteran runner (from the coppers). Set free on daily practice runs, Colin recalls in flashback the events which continue to shape his life. Richardson, too, seems set free, from the slick studio look, his black-and-white images, in tandem with John Addison's original score, recording the pulse of each sequence. He also has a keen eye for the ironic, as when warden Redgrave, in hat and coat, takes a meeting with his new blue-eyed-boy in the shower. But it is Courtenay himself who embodies the transition from sad, to angry, to absurd young man in his tics, his bemused smirk, and the way he sidles through his world until he is cut free to win a final, bitter victory.