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Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a 1960 British Kitchen sink drama film directed by Karel Reisz and produced by Tony Richardson. It is an adaptation of the 1958 novel of the same name by Alan Sillitoe, who also wrote the screenplay adaptation. The film is about a young machinist, Arthur, who spends his weekends drinking and partying, all the while having an affair with a married woman.
The film is one of a series of "kitchen sink drama" films made in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as part of the British New Wave of filmmaking, from directors such as Reisz, Jack Clayton, Lindsay Anderson, John Schlesinger and Tony Richardson and adapted from the works of writers such as Sillitoe, John Braine and John Osborne. A common trope in these films was the working-class "angry young man" character (in this case, the character of Arthur), who rebels against the oppressive system of his elders.
In 1999, the British Film Institute named Saturday Night and Sunday Morning the 14th greatest British film of all time on their Top 100 British films list.
Plot
Arthur Seaton is a young machinist at the Raleigh bicycle factory in Nottingham. He is determined not to be tied down to living a life of domestic drudgery like the people around him, including his parents, whom he describes as "dead from the neck up". He spends his wages at weekends on drinking and having a good time.
Arthur is having an affair with Brenda, the wife of an older colleague. He also begins a more traditional relationship with Doreen, a beautiful single woman closer to his age. Doreen, who lives with her mother and aspires to be married, avoids Arthur's sexual advances, so he continues to see Brenda as a sexual outlet.
Brenda becomes pregnant by Arthur, who offers to help raise the child or terminate the unwanted pregnancy (as abortion was not legal in Britain at the time of the film). Arthur takes her to see his Aunt Ada for advice. Ada has Brenda sit in a hot bath and drink gin, which does not work. Brenda asks Arthur for £40 to get an abortion from a doctor.
After Doreen complains about not going anywhere public with Arthur, he takes her to the fair where he sees Brenda. Arthur pulls Brenda aside, and she reveals that she has decided to have the child. As Arthur clings to her, she wriggles free because she is at the fair with her family. Arthur follows her on to an amusement ride and gets in a car with her. Brenda's brother-in-law and his friend notice her enter the ride and follow her, shocked to see Arthur riding with his arm around Brenda. Arthur escapes the ride, but he is later caught and beaten.
Arthur spends a week recovering and is visited by Doreen; they later have sex. After recovering, Arthur returns to work, and realises his affair with Brenda is finished after her husband tells him to stay away from Brenda. Arthur decides to marry Doreen. The film ends with Arthur and Doreen discussing the prospect of a new home together, with Arthur showing that he still has mixed feelings about settling down into domestic life. Jamie Russell of the BBC described the ending as "an ambiguous note of stone-throwing anger".
Style
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was at the forefront of the British New Wave, portraying British working class life in a serious manner for the first time and dealing realistically with sex and abortion. It was among the first of the "kitchen sink dramas" that followed the success of the play Look Back in Anger. Producer Tony Richardson later directed another such film, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), which was also adapted from an Alan Sillitoe book of the same name.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning received an X rating from the BBFC upon its theatrical release. It was re-rated PG for the 1990 home video release.
Bryanston guaranteed £81,820 of the budget, the NFFC provided £28,000, Twickenham Studios provided £610 and Richardson deferred his producers fee of £965. The film went £3,500 over budget and two days over schedule when filming at a Nottingham factory proved more difficult than expected. Woodfall bought the rights to the novel off Joseph Janni for £2,000 and got Stiltoe to do the script because they could not afford a professional screenwriter. The film made a profit of £500,000.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning opened at the Warner cinema in London's West End on 27 October 1960 and received generally favourable reviews. The film entered general release on the ABC cinema circuit from late January 1961 and was a box-office success, being the third most popular film in Britain that year. It earned over half a million pounds in profit.
Bryanston earned £145,000 in profit on the film.
Awards
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