Looking Back at the British New Wave

September 21–November 30, 2019

Look back at 1950s and ’60s British cinema and rediscover the England of Angry Young Men and working-class heroes, boundary-crossing writing and innovative direction, and electrifying acting by the likes of Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, and Julie Christie.

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Darling
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Look Back in Anger
Billy Liar
If . . .
Alfie
The Servant

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Films
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Past Films

Look Back in Anger
Tony Richardson
United Kingdom, 1959
Saturday, September 21 5:30 PM
Richard Burton is truly, madly angry—also eloquent, and unforgettable—as the jazz-playing misfit Jimmy Porter in the film based on John Osborne’s bombshell play, adapted by Tony Richardson.
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A Taste of Honey
Tony Richardson
United Kingdom, 1961
Sunday, September 22 7 PM
Interracial sex, homosexuality, and unwed pregnancy had the shock of the new in 1961, when Rita Tushingham worked her way into viewers’ hearts.
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The Entertainer
Tony Richardson
United Kingdom, 1960
Film to Table dinner follows
Saturday, September 28 5:30 PM
Laurence Olivier stars as a has-been music-hall performer—with Alan Bates and Albert Finney in their screen debuts—in John Osborne’s play-turned-film. Olivier’s “greatest contemporary role” (Pauline Kael).
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The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Tony Richardson
United Kingdom, 1962
Imported Print
Sunday, September 29 7 PM
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.
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This Sporting Life
Lindsay Anderson
United Kingdom, 1963
Sunday, October 13 7 PM
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.
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Darling
John Schlesinger
United Kingdom, 1965
Film to Table dinner follows

Homecoming Weekend: Plan ahead
With the Cal Football game at 11:30 AM, expect increased traffic and limited parking.
Saturday, October 19 5 PM
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).
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Billy Liar
John Schlesinger
United Kingdom, 1963
’Scope Print
Thursday, October 24 7 PM
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.
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CANCELED—Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Karel Reisz
United Kingdom, 1960
Canceled
This screening has been canceled due to the UC Berkeley campus power shutdown. Please watch this page for updates on rescheduling and ticket refund information.
Saturday, October 26 5:30 PM
Albert Finney’s star-making turn as a young Nottingham factory worker to the manner born, a consummate boozer, lover, gambler, and philosopher.
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Séance on a Wet Afternoon
Bryan Forbes
United Kingdom, 1964
BAMPFA Collection
Thursday, October 31 7 PM
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).
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Room at the Top
Jack Clayton
United Kingdom, 1958
Imported Print
Friday, November 15 4 PM
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.
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If . . .
Lindsay Anderson
United Kingdom, 1968
Digital Restoration
Sunday, November 17 7 PM
In 1968, the boarding school as metaphor for social control was a shot heard ’round the world. “A modern classic” (Time Out).
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The Servant
Joseph Losey
United Kingdom, 1963
Saturday, November 23 5 PM
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.
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Alfie
Lewis Gilbert
United Kingdom, 1966
Archival Print
Sunday, November 24 7 PM
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.
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Blow-Up
Michelangelo Antonioni
United Kingdom, 1966
Digital Restoration
Saturday, November 30 7 PM
Michelangelo Antonioni chose Swinging London as the setting for “a cryptic murder mystery . . . a landmark of the decade’s observational outrage and Pop disposability” (Time Out).
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Looking Back at the British New Wave

September 21–November 30, 2019

In 1956 in Britain, John Osborne’s electrifying play Look Back in Anger startled the drama world, and the 1958 film by Osborne and Tony Richardson’s fledgling company Woodfall Productions sent a similar shock of vitality through the cinema. In literature, theater, and film, it was the era of the Angry Young Man, the working-class hero railing against the bitter disappointments of everyday life in modern England’s industrial backyard, marking the end of the postwar promise. In Britain’s New Cinema of the 1960s, inflected by the experimental temperament of the Free Cinema documentary movement before it, authors and antiheroes were on the attack against the stifling deceits of cinema and of society, making concessions neither to commercial pressures nor to traditional inhibitions.

British anger plays differently in 2019, looking ahead to Brexit. But to view the New Cinema films from the perspective of today is to look...

British anger plays differently in 2019, looking ahead to Brexit. But to view the New Cinema films from the perspective of today is to look back in admiration to a moment when great writing met daring filmmaking, and all the screen was a stage for newcomers like Albert Finney, Alan Bates, Laurence Harvey, and Richard Burton, and the women, among them Rita Tushingham, Vanessa Redgrave, and Julie Christie. You will be neither judged nor disappointed if you luxuriate in their performances and the films’ crisp black-and-white cinematography. Just lie back and think of England.

— Judy Bloch

Complementing this series, David Thomson discusses the directors and performers of the British New Wave in four In Focus lecture/screening programs this fall.

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Series organized by Senior Film Curator Susan Oxtoby. BAMPFA wishes to thank the following individuals and institutions who have helped make this series possible: Hannah Prouse and George Watson, BFI; Haden Guest and Mark Johnson, Harvard Film Archive; Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum; Eric Di Bernardo, Rialto Pictures; and Brian Belovarac, Janus Films.