Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (film)

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Original British quad format cinema poster
Directed byKarel Reisz
Screenplay byAlan Sillitoe
Based onSaturday Night and Sunday Morning
by Alan Sillitoe
Produced byTony Richardson
Harry Saltzman (executive)
StarringAlbert Finney
Shirley Anne Field
Rachel Roberts
Hylda Baker
Norman Rossington
CinematographyFreddie Francis
Edited bySeth Holt
Music byJohn Dankworth
Production
company
Distributed byBryanston Films (UK)
Continental Distributing (USA)
Release dates
  • 27 October 1960 (1960-10-27) (UK)
  • 3 April 1961 (1961-04-03) (US)[1]
Running time
89 minutes
CountriesUnited Kingdom
United States
LanguageEnglish
Budget£116,848[2][3] or £120,420[4]
Box office£401,825 (UK) (as of 31 Dec 1964)[5][6]

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a 1960 British kitchen sink drama film directed by Karel Reisz and produced by Tony Richardson.[7] It is an adaptation of the 1958 novel by Alan Sillitoe, with Sillitoe himself writing the screenplay. The plot concerns a young teddy boy 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 is the working-class "angry young man" character (in this case, the character of Arthur), who rebels against the oppressive social and economic systems established by previous generations.

In 1999, the British Film Institute named Saturday Night and Sunday Morning the 14th greatest British film of all time on its list of the Top 100 British films.

  1. ^ The Times, 27 October 1960, pages 2: First advertisement for the film – found through The Times Digital Archive 14 September 2013
  2. ^ Chapman, J. (2022). The Money Behind the Screen: A History of British Film Finance, 1945-1985. Edinburgh University Press p 360
  3. ^ Petrie, Duncan James (2017). "Bryanston Films : An Experiment in Cooperative Independent Production and Distribution" (PDF). Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: 7. ISSN 1465-3451.
  4. ^ Chapman, L. (2021). “They wanted a bigger, more ambitious film”: Film Finances and the American “Runaways” That Ran Away. Journal of British Cinema and Television, 18(2), 176–197 p 182. https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2021.0565
  5. ^ Petrie p. 9
  6. ^ Sarah Street (2014) Film Finances and the British New Wave, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 34:1, 23-42 p27, DOI: 10.1080/01439685.2014.879000
  7. ^ "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning". British Film Institute Collections Search. Retrieved 17 August 2024.