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Let's be realistic.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Saturday NIGHT AND Sunday MORNING is a drama about a young and rebellious machinists, who shows a form of self-destructive behavior. Film is an adaptation of the 1958 novel of the same name by Alan Sillitoe.The main protagonist is a tough and robust worker at a Nottingham factory. He has a rebellious and somewhat cheeky attitude toward the lives of people around him. He is a diligent worker, but he spends his wages at weekends on drinking and having a good time. A wife of his older colleague is a his "pastime" during the weekend. However, he begins a more normal relationship with a beautiful single woman closer to his age. Problems start when his older mistress gets pregnant and demands his help in terminating the unwanted pregnancy...The main protagonist is a grouchy and skeptical young man. This is perhaps a disease of a young working class in industrial zones and traditional societies. The courage and dignity are, in some way, shaken in this film. Such relations seem impressive in an explicit and intimate story. A young man is faced with life's temptations. A solid relationship between people does not exist in this movie. It all boils down to a simple pleasure, as a form of escape from the loneliness and frustration. The word, responsibility, becomes very important.Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton is an unrealized hothead, which further emphasizes the rebellion in his character. Rachel Roberts as Brenda is a tragic character. In addition to her arrogance and shameless sexual relationship, Brenda is a reflection of an unfortunate women in a failed marriage.Shirley Anne Field (Doreen) is a quiet and beautiful girl, who is ready for marriage. Norman Rossington (Bert) is Arthur's faithful companion and sincere friend. Bryan Pringle (Jack) is a quite reserved Brenda's husband.Mr. Reisz has managed to make a credible drama based on realistic life situations in which there are no winners or losers.

"Don't let the b******s grind you down!" The words which Arthur, the protagonist of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, lives by. It is a powerful voice-over narration by Albert Finney which begins the film and introduces who his character is. The only problem is, he does not explain that this life motto - at least for him - means constant lying and a lack of consideration for women.We know from the get-go that Arthur is all about rebellion, specifically against his elders and their sense of tradition and manners; this is why he lacks any. He is also not the brightest star in the sky, letting his alcoholism (which he denies) get the best of him early on in the story.Arthur dreams big though. There is a great scene when he is fishing with his cousin talking about a new girl in his life Doreen, when he states "never bite unless the bait's good." If this is another part of his philosophy on life, it is curious as to why he goes for the older, married woman Brenda early on in the film. Perhaps he is learning since his relationship with Brenda comes back to bite him later in the story.With scenes of Arthur working at the factory, this becomes a commentary on the working class in England, but the commentary is slightly confusing. A young working man is susceptible to fall into a lifestyle including womanizing and living life to one's own terms, yet other characters who are nothing like him work with Arthur at the factory as well. In fact, Brenda's husband works at the same factory and from what we see of him he is a loving father and generally caring person. Perhaps, then, this film is a commentary on the young adult in England rather than the entire working class.This is clearly a "rebellion" movie which gets its point across with some strong voice-over work by Albert Finney, and while the acting is great and Arthur is a well-developed, detestable person, at some points the audience can't help but ask "so what?"3.0/4.0

Meeting an attractive young woman in a bar, Arthur Seaton wastes no time making his play. He asks her name, and is told with some embarrassment it's Doreen. She doesn't like her name. He doesn't like his, either."Neither of 'em's up to much, but it ain't our fault," he tells her. Like everything else in his unhappy life, it's all a matter of inheritance.Arthur may share a name with a heroic English king, but he's not one to wear his lower-middle-class crown agreeably. He drinks away his wages, lashes out at defenseless women, and lies with discomfiting ease. But Albert Finney and the filmmakers make sure you care about him anyway.As Seaton, Finney glowers a lot in the way you expect from a protagonist in a kitchen-sink drama, a celebrated product of British New Wave cinema. But the film plays with your expectations just as life does his. He doesn't want to settle for life as he finds it, and while "Saturday Night And Sunday Morning," Alan Sillitoe's adaptation of his own novel directed by Karel Reisz, spits a lot in the direction of conformity, it belies its angry-young-man pedigree with a sense of cosmic acceptance at taking what life has to offer.Seaton's a "madhead," make no mistake. But he's not an especially honest one. He lies impulsively, often to no purpose, and is even proud of it. "I always was a liar, a good one and all," he tells the married woman he sleeps with, Brenda (Rachel Roberts). Ironically, it's his one honest moment on her behalf that lands him in real trouble.The film gives us other hints Seaton is not an admirable figure, like shooting an annoying neighbor with an air rifle in a manner that comes off more creepy than defiant. A "working-class anti-hero," as other reviewers put it, and the real craft in both the direction and in Finney's performance is how it accomplishes the balancing act of establishing Seaton as both miserable company and a rooting interest.It's a well-structured film, too, a quick 90 minutes that breaks neatly into thirty minutes of establishing the situation, thirty minutes of developing a crisis (Seaton stringing along two women, one pregnant), and thirty minutes of tense resolution. At the same time, Reisz gives his film a grimy authenticity that feels real, never stagy, with scenes that have a real lived-in quality while serving the larger story."Saturday Night And Sunday Morning" is a bleak film in many ways, not pleasant to watch. Laughs and insights are minimal, and Finney downplays his considerable screen charm. There are hardly any toothy grins like he'd bestow on his later breakout role, as the title character in "Tom Jones." The handling of his relationship with Doreen is a trifle pat, and too-simply resolved. So is the issue of his relationship with Brenda, although Finney shares a good final scene with her character's husband, played effectively by Stephen Fry lookalike Bryan Pringle.There are a lot of good performances in this film, which blend together to create an effective if routine story. If it's not what you expect from angry-young-man cinema, it's nice to have your expectations batted down now and then.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a really stripped down, down-and-dirty covering of both life and the people in and around an early 1960s working Britain. At a time and in a place, you feel, in which living and getting by is hard enough all in itself, and that confrontation which comes with exterior events instigated by third parties would preferably be kept to a minimum for all involved such are life's other worries, the film centres around a man so embittered and carefree in relation to his actions and others around him that such events can only become apparent. Karel Reisz's film is a covering of this man; a man whose actions and feelings towards both the world and those he works with causes chaos and confrontation about every-which way of the place. Lumped, I read, with the 'X' certificate upon British release for its stark and confrontational attitude towards life in an English city seemingly devoid of soul, smiles and all else remotely pleasant; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a pulsating, stark and confrontational look at the dishevelment of the working class, sternly uninterested in conforming to either genre or concrete narrative framework, but morbidly fascinating as a result.The loose cannon at the heart of it all is Albert Finney's Arthur Seaton, a quite glorious portrayal on behalf of Finney of a factory worker pummelling himself into the ground both inside and outside of the work place. Occupying a simplistic terrace house overlooking a bricked up thoroughfare for pedestrians only, further more neighbouring a less-than-busy bricked up public street, Arthur lives a life amidst the gossipping middle aged female neighbours of sleaze, filth and unease. He's engaged in an affair with Brenda (Roberts), the wife of a co-worker, despite already living in with another woman, and spends most of his time drinking; womanising; smoking and as a rather hate filled man complete with big build and a mouth to match. He additionally has a penchant for gambling which, when challenged on the subject, merely replies with the hapless notion that "it's not a waste of money, I quite enjoy betting". There just isn't much talking to him.When we first encounter him, it's through his own narration to himself highlighting the disdain and dishevelment he feels towards all of his job; his boss and his co-workers in there with him. The dismissive manner at which he brushes aside the elements with the tone he adopts as the heavy machinery whirls away enraptures us straight away; the combined noise that the machinery creates twinned with the movement from the man as he works it in a manner that seems just as strange and as alien to us as it does with a calculated sense of aggression painting immediate portraits of danger. Where the film will take us after this confrontational opening is a quite harrowing descent into this man's life and mind, those around him and their lives which he makes somewhat of a misery, given ample attention.By nights, predominantly weekends, Arthur works himself into a state of numbness or until he drops in another incarnation; specifically, in the way of alcohol at a local public house rather than at hard graft in a factory. His suiting up to go out to some jazz music post-work during the evening is deceptively upbeat, as if two different personas exist within the man's life and the deliberate montage of the man, quite literally, changing in-front of us so as to venture out and become someone away from the workplace with a different set of rules deliberately ringing false, effectively instilling even more of a sense of bleakness about things. Like the scary and dystopian world in which it is set, there is no neat little core around which a stone-wall narrative may unfold or revolve around for the best part. The atmosphere of aggression and general feeling of pained immorality is everywhere; Arthur's affair with Brenda standing alongside the relationship he's in with another woman named Doreen (Field) whereas the sorts of ill-conceived and childish antics he gets up in toying with other locals offers fleeting amusement away from the dirge of everything else in everyday life.The item that brings the film to a hilt is directly linked to that of Brenda; Arthur's affair with her resulting in a pregnancy as her husband Jack, a character of a downplayed and hushed nature played by a certain Bryan Pringle, continues to mingle around heightening tension and threatening things to a point of escalation. Jack's fairly innocent persona and victimisation has us dislike Arthur more than we might've done had he been of a similar ilk; his calling in of a brother who's in the army and his friends of a hardened nature to find the man Brenda committed infidelity with a taking of action we don't believe is ordinarily the run-of-the-mill for Jack. His actions that are taken puts things into perspective, his emotions effectively established to be running dangerously high. A brief retort even sees Arthur speak of how he once saw one man take on two soldiers and beat them half to death, the sight of so much blood causing him to look away – the unsettling sense that Arthur may have been that man involved first hand in the fight a rather than the onlooker another ingredient handled remarkably. Czech born director, and future producer of the similarly themed 1963 film This Sporting Life, Reisz takes us to the edge in his feature debut; revolving every scene around the character of Arthur and his stance on life and those around him; his film is taut, terrifying and tumultuous in equal measure as a gritty, realist piece is executed marvellously.