Saturday night to Sunday morning
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Saturday night to Sunday morning |
| Original title | Saturday Night and Sunday Morning |
| Country of production | United Kingdom |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1960 |
| length | 89 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 18 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Karel Reisz |
| script | Alan Sillitoe |
| production | Tony Richardson |
| music | Johnny Dankworth |
| camera | Freddie Francis |
| cut | Seth Holt |
| occupation | |
| |
Saturday Night through Sunday Morning is a socially critical British drama from 1960 directed by Karel Reisz and starring Albert Finney .
action
Nottingham in the late 1950s. Arthur Seaton earns not badly as a machinist in a factory in Central England, but at the same time he is dissatisfied with the narrowness of his own existence, with his life that is stuck in a deadlock. He doesn't want to end up like his parents, who hunched over their heads all their lives and whom he describes as "dead from the neck up". At the weekend, from Saturday night to Sunday morning, there are always the same pleasures to escape the monotonous working day: go fishing, then to the cinema, then a drinking competition in his local pub and finally the obligatory night of love with Brenda, the wife of a little sausage from Colleagues. Everything goes its way; Even Arthur's minimal rebellions to offer his life variety and to give a kick, possibly even to break out, are strangely indifferent and aimless and get stuck in the small and their own, banal egoisms.
One day, three things happen that seem to upset Arthur's little world: Brenda is expecting a child. By him? From your husband? No, obviously from him, because nothing has happened between Brenda and her guy for a long time. Arthur goes out and gets an address from Aunt Ada to have an abortion (which was still illegal at the time) . When Brenda's husband finds out about it, he reacts to it in a way that such problems are solved in working-class circles in Central England: firmly and brutally. Arthur is beaten up by him, his brother, and a fellow soldier as a kind of lesson. Brenda has decided to have the child. She will stay with her husband and will not see Arthur again.
In the meantime Arthur has also started something with the pretty, young Doreen, who would love to marry him. Arthur gets involved with the girl, but his enthusiasm for getting into the old waters of an ordinary relationship with a wife, marriage certificate, possibly a child and row house does not exactly trigger storms of enthusiasm in him. Ultimately, he agrees, not least due to his own lack of drive, lack of perspective and his inability to seriously turn the corner and break out of the rut. Small rebellions against this life, which he actually hated, from which he felt tied up in a corset, remained stuck in sometimes childish approaches until the end: Arthur, in his utter helplessness, merely throws a stone at the advertising sign of the construction company that is pulling up those row houses, one of which will be his home from now on. He sees a future that is not really different from the present of his parents and that walls him up forever: in a row house with a garden, wife and child.
Production notes
Saturday night to Sunday morning was shot in spring 1960 at several locations in England ( Nottingham , London -Battersea) and premiered on October 27, 1960. The German premiere was on March 15, 1961.
Tom Pevsner served Karel Reisz as assistant director, Ronnie Taylor was a simple cameraman under Freddie Francis .
Film historical background
The film is regarded as a prime example of a new, socially realistic British cinema in direct consequence of the Nouvelle Vague in France and wanted to radically break with the British version of " Papa's cinema ", the conventional entertainment film of conventional design. The most important representatives of what these films were sometimes called with mockery, “ sink realism ” directing school were, next to Karel Reisz, Jack Clayton , Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson .
Award
1961 won the British Film Academy Award for Best British Film Saturday night through Sunday morning . Other British film awards went to Albert Finney (Best Young Actor) and Rachel Roberts ( Best British Actress ). In the same year Finney won the American National Board of Review Award , the film received further awards at the Argentine film festival in Mar del Plata (best film, best actor, best screenplay, FIPRESCI award ).
Reviews
“Saturday night to Sunday morning” consistently turned away from the usual glitter and glamor entertainment cinema and dealt intensively with the gray reality of the British underdog society. The film gave a realistic (clearly influenced by documentarism) inside view of a world of the working class determined by everyday sadness. Similar to Jack Clayton's “The Way Up”, Richardson's “Bitter Honey” and “The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner” or Anderson's “Alluring Laurel”, a film that Reisz produced in 1962, “Saturday night to Sunday morning” was not just seen as socially critical Stocktaking, but also testified to the rebellion of the 'young savages', the 'angry young men' within the domestic cinema industry against general social incrustations in the British post-war society. "
Reclam's film guide states: “Karel Reisz carefully observed the life of his hero and described it in a documentary. He registers the narrowness of the approaches, the stale superficiality of the pleasures; but he also points to the causes: the oppressive milieu and the mind-numbing monotony at work ... "
In Bucher's encyclopedia of the film you can read: “This realistic film adaptation of Alan Sillitoe's novel about an irresponsible worker who, through the events of a weekend that he had started in a typically frivolous manner, gained insight into the realities of life, brought the The initial success of Room at the Top (1958) and Look Back in Anger (1959) the final breakthrough for realistic cinema in England and paved the way for further feature films of the Free Cinema movement. Albert Finney… played the hero with humor and strength, and Reisz's sympathetic direction was able to convey the atmosphere of an industrial city and its effects on human relationships. "
In the lexicon of the international film it says: “A sensitively observed everyday protocol that reveals the social background and whose hero, in his unreflective but consistent rebellion, becomes a symbol of the discontented British post-war generation. First feature film by the native Czech Karel Reisz, who founded the socially critical "Free Cinema" together with Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson. "
Halliwell's Film Guide characterized the film as follows: "Sensational when the film came out, this rough working-class drama, with its sharp detail and strong comic elements, delighted the masses thanks to the strong central character that messes with the authorities."
"Here is the chance for our own Nouvelle Vague."
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 1: A - C. Erik Aaes - Jack Carson. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 99.
- ↑ Reclams Filmführer, by Dieter Krusche, collaboration: Jürgen Labenski. P. 510. Stuttgart 1973.
- ↑ Bucher's Encyclopedia of Films, Verlag CJ Bucher, Lucerne and Frankfurt / M. 1977, p. 676 f.
- ↑ Saturday night to Sunday morning. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ^ Leslie Halliwell : Halliwell's Film Guide, Seventh Edition, New York 1989, p. 883
Web links
- Saturday Night and Sunday Morning at the Internet Movie Database (English)