Tony Richardson

He worked on adaptations cos he was a theatre director who transferred. Although he did a couple of 'Free Cinema' bits, he was best known as a director at the Royal Court: it was he who directed 'LBIA' on stage (Burton was TOTALLY wrong for the part) in 1956. Linsday Anderson was also a big director at the Royal Court. Both were also involved in the '50s Sight and Sound. Can't remember if he had also written for Sequence at Oxford (Anderson and KArel Reisz's mag that more or less took over S&S). It was the stage success, rather than the Free Cinema films, that enabled TR, then the others, to make the kitchen sink classics of 59-63.

'Tom Jones' was a major international success. It's terrible, a rubbishy rip-off of a style Godard had already left behind.

David Thomson is harsh on TR, but only a blind man could prefer his stuff to Reisz's or Anderson's; but he was a good earnest lefty and all that, so no disrespect? Dunno, but I don't think he had either a feel for working-class life or an appreciation that it was changing.

i like "a taste of honey" a lot, more for the performances and the script than for the directing, probably. how was burton miscast in "look back in anger"?

He's too... strong, I guess, for the part. I don't make him as a frustrated Nottingham market trader, he's too romantic.

i thought that was the point, that jimmy porter was a university-educated guy who was deliberately slumming? it's been a while since i read the play, so i could be misremembering.

Me too, actually -- yeah, maybe he did. Not sure.

J.D. is correct; he's certainly an educated character. LBIA is a play on chose to write on for an A-Level assignment, alongside "Waiting For Godot", to look at different sorts of theatrical radicalism in the 50s. Suffice to say, I far prefer Beckett's approach... though something like "The Entertainer" has always intrigued me, and I imagine it'll be a much stronger play than LBIA.

In terms of Richardson, while I take on board the venerable David Thomson's points, "A Taste of Honey" and "The Loved One" I'd rather like to see... anyone seen his adaptation of the Waugh? I think it has Gielgud, Rod Steiger in main roles.

Hmm, triangualting Arete's collection of Waugh's dim memoes and the Grauniad's bit on 'The Loved One' I think I could do without. When it comes to Anglo-Catholic novellists and their view of cinema, I'll take Greene.

However, what *would* make a great film is Isherwood's 1946 'Prater Violet', about an Austrian director stranded in London in the 30s and collaborating with an upper-middle class socialist, it's a kind of follow-up to the Berlin books. IMO his best book. Any financiers out there?