Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Albert Finney in the Arthur Seaton role for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) is perhaps the closest Britain ever got to having its own James Dean or Marlon Brando. His defiant, razor-sharp quotes are up there with the best: "whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not" and the even more iconic, "What I’m out for is a good time, all the rest is propaganda."

Yet unlike America’s post-war generation of broody rebels without a cause, Finney’s role was instead characterised by his brusque northern working class demeanour and animalistic energy, not seen before in British cinema. The "angry young man" arrived on the screens a year before Finney’s Seaton by way of director Tony Richardson’s groundbreaking British new wave feature Look Back in Anger (1959), with a score by trad jazz leader Chris Barber.

Prior to this, in 1956, British-based film makers Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Lorenza Mazzetti had set up a programme of documentaries under the banner "free cinema". A precursor to the new wave, it articulated through a series of low-budget documentaries everyday life how it was really lived, advocating a gritty social realism as an alternative to the sentimentality of established post-war British cinema.