Film Forum

(1959, Tony Richardson) Embittered jazzman Richard Burton, waging a one-man war against the hypocrisy of Brit society, reaches the boiling point when wife Claire Bloom’s old pal – snooty actress Claire Bloom – comes for a two-week stay. Original stage director Richardson brought John Osborne’s hit play to the screen. DCP. Approx. 99 mins.

Reviews

“[A] ferocious account of the emotional vandalism committed by what is popularly known as an 'angry young man’…  Has a sort of metallic clatter and bang and a throbbing, eccentric jazz tempo. The long accumulation of middle-class smugness against which [Burton] fitfully rebels by blowing a jazz trumpet at a Saturday-night hot spot and blasting the Sabbath dawn is brilliantly illustrated by shots of people going to church in the rain and by glimpses of rows of ugly houses and streets in which grimy youngsters play.”
– Bosley Crowther, The New York Times