Never mind the Sex Pistols-back in the 1960s, Britain's Angry Young Man movement made the phrase "There will always be an England" sound more like a prognosis than a promise. If these brilliantly scripted films, starring the likes of Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Laurence Harvey, were prophetic then, they are classics now.
Read full descriptionThe Peter Cook and Dudley Moore cult classic comedy, a Faustian bargain at any price.
In 1968, the boarding school as metaphor for social control was a shot heard 'round the world. "A modern classic."-Time Out
England swings like a pendulum in Richard Lester's take on hooking up and how to do it, '60s-style. Rita Tushingham shines through the script's inherent misogyny.
Before Alfie, Michael Caine was just some great British actor. In its offhand candor on all things sexual, Alfie was what it was all about.
Hey there, Lynn Redgrave-you were irrepressible in this antic tragedy of Swinging London and its discontents. With Alan Bates as a catch, and James Mason as a lech.
Decades later this tale of a London kidnapping remains suspenseful; creepy, too, since ransom is not the reason. Kim Stanley as a medium and Richard Attenborough as her milquetoast mate are "utterly superb."-Time Out
Tom Courtenay in Tony Richardson's famously experimental narrative recounting the events in the life of a Borstal lad as he runs track-running for his life.
With the marvelous Simone Signoret, this classic about a Machiavellian social climber (Laurence Harvey) endures as a love story, set against the fraught class relations in the North Country in the 1950s. Jack Clayton directs.
Let's play master and servant! Dirk Bogarde and James Fox do it in this striking parable on class conflict, Joseph Losey's first collaboration with Harold Pinter.
Albert Finney's star-making turn as a young Nottingham factory worker to the manner born, a consummate boozer, lover, gambler, and philosopher.
John Schlesinger's Billy Liar broke with kitchen-sink realism to provide star-making roles for Tom Courtenay as a daydreaming undertaker's assistant and Julie Christie as a wistful beatnik.
Schlesinger's time capsule of Swinging London, with Julie Christie as a model on the make, Dirk Bogarde, and Laurence Harvey. "Diamond-hard, diamond-bright."-New Yorker
Richard Harris as the essential working-class antihero, a bruised and bruising rugby player in England's North Country, in Lindsay Anderson's forceful, psychologically complex first feature, noted for introducing a truly modern sensibility to British cinema.
Interracial sex, homosexuality, and unwed pregnancy had the shock of the new in 1961, when Rita Tushingham worked her way into viewers' hearts.
Laurence Olivier as a has-been music-hall performer-and Alan Bates and Albert Finney in their screen debuts-in John Osborne's play-turned-film, Olivier's "greatest contemporary role."-Pauline Kael
Anderson's brief, poetic documentaries were a precursor to the British New Wave.
Richard Burton is truly, madly angry-also eloquent, and unforgettable-as the jazz-playing misfit Jimmy Porter in the 1958 film based on John Osborne's bombshell play, directed by Tony Richardson.