Northern Kitchen Sink Cinema

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what are the best, in your opinion?

― gareth (gareth), Monday, 4 August 2003 08:03 (twenty-two years ago)

I like A Taste of Honey a lot. Rita Tushingham as sullen, naive, wistful Jo = permanently fixed in my list of all-time absurd crushes. The others are good too but more dated, and the faux 'new wave' style looks pretty lame now. Look Back in Anger is worth seeing at least once.

― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Monday, 4 August 2003 08:35 (twenty-two years ago)

a taste of honey for me I think, or maybe Long distance runner.

― chris (chris), Monday, 4 August 2003 08:36 (twenty-two years ago)

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I have read complaints about them being cliched but that doesn't really matter unless you watch them all in chronological order. There was once a season of them on Channel 4 on Sunday nights and it was bliss.

― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Monday, 4 August 2003 08:59 (twenty-two years ago)

Does "Kes" count? Or "Billy Liar"? If so, they get my vote. If not then "A Taste of honey".

― Tag (Tag), Monday, 4 August 2003 09:43 (twenty-two years ago)

Don't let the bastards grind you down! Classic.

― kayT (kaytee), Monday, 4 August 2003 17:55 (twenty-two years ago)

"this sporting life" is far and away the best of the bunch.

― noodle vague (noodle vague), Monday, 4 August 2003 21:28 (twenty-two years ago)

Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (for many reasons)

― robin carmody (robin carmody), Monday, 4 August 2003 23:33 (twenty-two years ago)

robin, im not a fan of silltioe as a writer, why is the film better?

(i trust your opinion on this more than anyone, but others please reply too)

― gareth (gareth), Monday, 4 August 2003 23:52 (twenty-two years ago)

Some of it is purely personal; it's set in Nottingham in the early 60s, and a friend of mine was poised with his reel-to-reel tape recorder in front of the TV in that city at the time, capturing TV announcements and the like (my favourite of his recordings is one of the first Radiophonic Workshop interlude pieces, a piercing blast which ironically considering your other thread was used on this occasion in 1961 to fill two minutes' countdown to a live church service from Ampleforth Abbey, the very heart of the Yorkshire you've never lived in). Also the only MP from 1959-62 who is still in the Commons today, Peter Tapsell, originally sat for Nottingham West. But I don't expect any of that to mean anything to you!

I suppose what I like about "Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" the film is what some might regard as overtly simplistic analogies; the crushing defeat at the end of the race and drudgery of the final scene as metaphor for the class system, etc, etc. I just like the atmosphere of the film, the smell of defeat, the *hopelessness* (and, from the historical perspective, the sheer contrast to the explosion of working-class self-confidence we associate with 1963 onwards, which effectively killed off the kitchen-sink genre in its original form - This Sporting Life coincides with the first flush of Beatlemania, after which such films would be out of favour until the new uncertainties of the early 70s). The spot-on period feel ("take death off the road" says one of the characters when he sees an old banger, echoing that uber-1960 Halas & Bachelor public information film). The mockery of the lie that *everyone* had elevated themselves to a consumer lifestyle (that accelerated sequence mocking TV ads with the Rediffusion star appearing on screen about every four seconds). Ultimately, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner makes me feel as though I'm *there*, and fills in parts of a past discovered through friendships 40 years later. It's a bitter film, the best expression of my (and probably many other people's) nihilist side. It is on the side of humanity, but not on the side of the society in which they had to live at the time; certainly it makes me glad I was born when I was. What was that about "the ability to rage correctly"? This film has it.

― robin carmody (robin carmody), Tuesday, 5 August 2003 01:14 (twenty-two years ago)

I like it when the pound notes come down the drainpipe.

― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Tuesday, 5 August 2003 07:37 (twenty-two years ago)

My favourite bit too, Tom Courtenay is so bloody good in that film. Has the L-shaped room been mentioned yet? does it count?

― chris (chris), Tuesday, 5 August 2003 07:38 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm going to have to watch it again, I think I have it on tape somewhere. All I remember is that I liked it and Tom Courtenay running a lot.

― Tag (Tag), Tuesday, 5 August 2003 07:46 (twenty-two years ago)

I like it when his younge siblings chant 'HE GOES AFTER GIRLS! HE GOES AFTER GIRLS!'. But I fear I have said all this before.

― N. (nickdastoor), Tuesday, 5 August 2003 08:32 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm going to have to watch it again now as well.

― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Tuesday, 5 August 2003 08:35 (twenty-two years ago)

It was here:

saturday night and sunday morning

― N. (nickdastoor), Tuesday, 5 August 2003 08:36 (twenty-two years ago)

I never did find out what "Spring and Port Wine" was all about. But I just looked it up on imdb and it's set in Bolton and stars Adrienne Posta. Help! I need to see this. Preferably right this minute.

― Tag (Tag), Tuesday, 5 August 2003 09:38 (twenty-two years ago)

I second "Billy Liar" and "Loneliness...", though "Billy Liar" did it a bit more for me personally than LOTLDR.
Avoid "Look Back in Anger" really; it's a very humdrum and uninspired filmic take on the play (which itself is not a play, though obviously an interesting and 'important' one).
Take or leave "Room at the Top"... I saw it too long ago to fully remember all the details, but at its heart this was perhaps too sensationalised a film. It has the profoundly uninteresting figure of Laurence Harvey at its core perhaps crucially.

Possibly my favourite of this film genre along with "Billy Liar" is "This Sporting Life", which Robin mentioned. Fine acting from Hartnell, Roberts, Harris and Blakely, I recall, and very evocative in its atmosphere of the time. Good Yorkshire setting, am I right?
I haven't seen "Saturday Night & Sunday Morning" as of yet, amongst others.

― Tom May (Tom May), Tuesday, 5 August 2003 16:18 (twenty-two years ago)

the pound notes running down the drainpipe, oh yes!

― robin carmody (robin carmody), Tuesday, 5 August 2003 22:40 (twenty-two years ago)

I hate them all!

― dog latin (dog latin), Tuesday, 5 August 2003 23:30 (twenty-two years ago)

nine years pass...

A Kind of Loving - the most sensitive of these movies. Alan Bates is great in depicting an indecisive young man entering a serious relationship for the first time

Saturday Night Sunday Morning - has been leveled with charges of misogyny (women as emasculating materialists yada yada) which i wouldnt fully subscribe to tbh its got a great energy and albert finney is superb in it

This Sporting Life - definitely ahead of its time in examining identity and masculinity. worth watching a few times.

― Michael B Higgins (Michael B), Sunday, 18 November 2012 20:41 (thirteen years ago)

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