Odeio Essa Mulher

Rebellious youth has always been a good subject for movie makers and Look Back in Anger for the United Kingdom became what The Wild One and The Blackboard Jungle were on this side of the Atlantic.

Though like Marlon Brando, Richard Burton should have been way too old to portray a rebellious youth, he certainly overcomes it with a bravura performance. Burton saw the play on the London stage and went to author John Osbourne and told him he wanted to do the screen version.

For the screen version the producers had the good sense to hire Osbourne to write all the additional scenes needed for a film. The play as presented on stage takes place entirely within the apartment of married couple Richard Burton and Mary Ure. He's a lower class youth who's married well beyond his station. Class and station are quite a bit more rigid in Europe than they are here. He's got a dead end job with a peddler's license in an open air market.

In generations gone by the character of Jimmy Porter would have been off for adventure in some faraway place with a strange sounding name that the United Kingdom had as a part of its empire&commonwealth. But the empire is no more and British society as a whole was adjusting to it in the post World War II years. So all Mr. Burton can do is play his raging trumpet and take out his frustrations on all around him.

Mary Ure repeated her role from both the Drury Lane and Broadway productions and she and Burton are joined by a good ensemble with Claire Bloom, Edith Evans, Gary Raymond in the main feature parts. Also look for Donald Pleasance in an early role as an officious inspector at the market, the kind of bureaucrat you love to hate.

Although the UK is still around minus the empire, Look Back In Anger is a fascinating look back to post World War II Great Britain.

What must have seemed like a stunning piece of "kitchen sink" realism at the time, now looks a bit too staged and artificial because the performances are keyed to the stage rather than film. Ironically, they work against the natural, low-key settings of the dingy flat that is the centerpiece of the story--at least for much of the film.

Tony Richardson has opened the stage play with the result that he's had to cut down on all the expository stage dialog to give us a direct view of the angry young man (RICHARD BURTON) in his present surroundings. Burton attacks his role with a ferocity that is reminiscent of the way Kirk Douglas attacked such a role in YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN, another angry young man American style.

The film successfully followed the pattern of other such stories that emerged during the hectic '50s, the James Dean struggles for independence as a troubled youth, only here the accent is on the slowly disintegrating marriage of Burton and MARY URE, repeating the role she played on the London stage, while he lashes out at society for condemning him to a dreary working class life he knows is below his station.

RICHARD BURTON plays the lead with theatrical flourishes and GARY RAYMOND and CLAIRE BLOOM (as "the other woman") are fine in less showy roles.

Summing up: Stripped of most of the explosive dialog that made the play such a steamy hit in London, the film manages to be little more than an atmospheric B&W look at the squalor and depression of the times among the lower classes.

Before George and Martha there were Jimmy and Alison, the vituperate couple at the heart of Osborne's legendary play and I suppose you could say the British Kitchen Sink movement started here. The difference, of course, being that while the Arthur Seatons and Colin Smiths of this world were unequivocally working-class kicking against the system and the intelligentsia, Jimmy and Alison were the intelligentsia playing at being working-class. And therein lies the rub; unlike later 'kitchen sink' movies "Look Back in Anger" isn't so much looking back as mired in the past, an uneasy amalgam of the kind of British films that were coming out in the late fifties and the kind of ground-breaking British cinema that would come to prevail in the early sixties.

There is no denying it is extremely well played. Burton is loudly splendiferous as Jimmy yet he seems strangely miscast at the same time. Perhaps it's that booming, melodious voice; this is a Jimmy that is more Shakespeare than Osborne, (note how Olivier completely subsumed his Shakespearean tendencies to become the definitive Osborne hero in "The Entertainer"). By the time Burton got around to playing George in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" you could say he had grown into the part.

Better cast are Mary Ure as Alison and Claire Bloom as Helena. Their performances feel new and edgy, a move away from the traditional kind of performances that British actresses had been giving up to then while Gary Raymond is an admirable Cliff and a miscast Edith Evans does what she can with Ma Tanner. Tony Richardson opens it out from the Porter's depressing flat to give a more 'cinematic' feel yet it still feels stagey and not in a good way. It's a refreshingly 'grown-up' movie but you may still wonder what all the fuss was about when the original play first opened.

Those people in Britain who hark back to some kind of mythical golden age. Meet Jimmy Porter from 1959. Here is a well balanced individual. He has a chip on both shoulders!

Jimmy Porter (Richard Burton) is an angry young man in Derby. A working class lad with a university degree who is bitter at the world and whatever injustices it holds.

Jimmy works in a market stall with his amiable Welsh lodger Cliff, both enjoy jazz in the evenings. Jimmy is married to an upper middle class wife Alison (Mary Ure) who he is constantly mean to. Cliff tries to keep the peace.

When Alison invites her actress friend Helena (Clair Bloom) to stay with them. Tension between the couple increases especially with someone close to Jimmy becoming seriously ill. Jimmy also despises Helena and Alison leaves him unable to tell him that she is pregnant.

In a twist, Helena who also loathes Jimmy ends up becoming his lover. It leads to the viewer to think if she engineered Alison's departure.

Director Tony Richardson was inspired by the French New Wave of realist cinema. It features a powerhouse performance from Burton. All rage and fury yet compassionate to the little fellow, here an Indian market trader constantly discriminated against.

Looking back at the film, Jimmy Porter comes across as a petty mean bully against his wife rather than a grey bleak post war Britain unsure of itself with the loss of an empire. He could had social climbed the corporate ladder with his degree but seems to have wasted any potential opportunities.

Look Back in Anger heralded a new type of film with a different portrayal of the working classes, more raw and honest. Ironically writer John Osborne who wrote the original stage play became a country squire later in life. The original angry young man ended up being rather fond of the establishment that he once detested.

There's a very angry lad by name of Jimmy, lives on a squalid upstairs floor, that's rather dingy, seems to hate his gorgeous lass, because she has a bit of class, a perpetual complainer whose quite whingey. Things get worse when wife's friend Helena arrives, as they lock horns, and he goes into overdrive, rage and fury then ensue, there's nothing Alison can do, she calls her father, who picks her up, and off they drive - and right on cue, Helena drops her drawers!

Why on earth would such a lovely lass marry a person with such an uncontrollable rage, almost to the extent that it comes across as a mental illness. For me, Richard Burton layers on the anger so much that it detracts from the frustration a man in his position would more realistically feel, and the way it would present.

Fine dialogue, the rest of the cast are brilliant, just an over the top performance from someone playing the most melodramatic way they can, detracts from the whole, unfortunately.