“I'm a six-foot prop that wants a pint of beer, that's what. But if any knowing bastard tells them that's me, I'll tell 'em I'm a dynamite dealer waiting to blow the factory to kingdom come.... Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not....” Thus spake Arthur Seaton, the angry young man of Nottingham, by day a factory worker, by night a boozer, lover, gambler and, after a fashion, philosopher. Arthur is nourished by mischief and dares to revel in it - playing practical jokes at the local pub, or mocking his parents, whom he views unrepentently as “dead from the neck up.” When he gets his lover - the wife of a fellow worker - pregnant, he takes on another, younger lover in the midst of the crisis. But Arthur's anarchy is neither glorified nor horrified under Karel Reisz's direction, constistently striving for authenticity and intelligence. And in the unhappy end, Arthur does not blow up the factory. He's still throwing stones, but now it's at the housing project into which he is destined to move with his bride-to-be; he's going to raise a family.
Albert Finney, catapulted to international fame with his first major film role, was called at the time by the British film magazine Films and Filming “the nearest thing Britain has to the best of America's ‘method' actors...he is right inside the character,” by Time “the most brilliant actor of his age in the English-speaking world.” His performance was no doubt the key to the box-office success of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, drawing international attention to the British “Free Cinema” - works by Tony Richardson, John Osborne, and others which explored the realities of the British working class with concessions neither to commercial pressures nor traditional inhibitions. (JB)