Better In Your Head?--SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING

 

Spoiler Alert: whatever y'all say I am, is who I'm not.

THE BOOK-Written by Alan Sillitoe, released 1958

THE MOVIE-Directed by Karel Reisz, written by Alan Sillitoe, released 1960

THE STORY-A lather's life isn't much, but it's steady work, and it clears room for the choicest spices--plentiful pints, casual violence, dangerous sex. No, it isn't much, which means you can go back for more.

MIND THE GAP-Arthur Seaton, y'all. Factory drone by day, puss-poacher by night, stuck with the sort of face that cannot ever fully be trusted nor ignored. In the midst of chaos he is whole. Nice bloke to visit, but I'd not want to live with him. Those 200+ pages fairly flew by, but 90 minutes might be a test. Well, I rose to the challenge like truth from a drunken mouth, and it's down to Albert Finney. In just his second film, Finney announced himself as a major talent. He's a magnetic sleaze, too human to hate.

Alan Sillitoe's debut novel threw open the floodgates for a frothing mob of "angry young men" in fiction, physically and spiritually defiant souls disgusted by the establishment, wounded warriors repulsed by their inherited arsenal, resentful of battlefields whose locations and dimensions were decided-upon generations before. As with most things, a little goes a lotta.

Makes sense everyone calls each other "duck." They sustain on any bits tossed in their general direction.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning broke the ground Trainspotting salted thirty-five years later. 

Left newly vulnerable after a well-deserved ass-beating, the cynical rotter decides to change his mendacious ways. High time Arthur plays an active role in his own life! Embrace the monotony of monogamy! Will it last till bits of sky splish-splash in the ocean? Are Mr. and Mrs. Seaton dunzo once the first brat's out? Maybe and maybe. Arthur knows that; he's stubborn, not stupid, and that's my favorite thing about the guy. Life goes from "bless you" to "screw you" in half a snap. We are owed no better. If you're going to craft a castle from the sands of time, better brace your back to bear the frigid waves. And never, ever lose track of the seagulls.

"(A)s though somebody slung a bottle of ink at her." Seriously?

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-The movie's really good. Really pointless, also. Don't misunderstand, I recommend the watch. (Apparently it ushered in the "New Wave of British Cinema.") Finney's marvelous and the accents on display transform conversations into knife fights. But Sillitoe puts readers proper in the pudding; anything else is skin.