Sara Martín Alegre P08/04540/02135

Kingsley�Amis
's 
Lucky Jim
(1954), 
John
More information
For more information on the
Angry Young Men and The
Movement, see subsections
3.4 and 4.2, respectively, of
this module.

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© FUOC
• P08/04540/02135
16
Post-War English Literature 1945-1990
Waine
's 
Hurry on Down
(1953), 
John�Braine
's 
Room at the Top
(1957), 
Allan
Sillitoe
's 
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning
(1958), 
Keith�Waterhouse
's 
Billy Liar
(1958), or 
David�Storey
's 
This Sporting Life
(1960), dramatise the position of
the individual who is aware of the new chances for upward social mobility
and who either benefits from them –hence Jim's luck– or sees them slip from
his grasp, whether by choice or because the social structure is still too rigid.
What is relevant is that through these novels a world that had been
neglected by pre-war fiction entered the course of the English novel,
often in close alliance with the 
Free�Cinema�movement
of the 1960s,
which frequently found its inspiration in these novels and the plays of
the Angry Young Men. Both films and novels portray an England that
is no longer the heroic country of World War II but a country struggling
to understand its own contradictions.
Free Cinema
Name given to the group of filmmakers whose main representatives were Lindsay
Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson. They rebelled against the conformism of
British commercial cinema of the 1950s and produced films inspired by experience,
contemporary social reality, and the rigour of the English documentary school. The
two masterpieces of Free Cinema are 
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning
(1960), by Karel
Reisz, and 
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
(1962), by Tony Richardson, both
adaptations of novels by Alan Sillitoe.