A Kind of Loving (John Schlesinger, 1962)

June Ritchie and Alan Bates in A Kind of Loving

Cast: Alan Bates, June Ritchie, Thora Hird, Bert Palmer, Pat Keen, James Bolam, Jack Smethurst, Gwen Nelson, John Ronane, David Mahlowe, Patsy Rowlands. Screenplay: Willis Hall, Keith Waterhouse, based on a novel by Stan Barstow. Cinematography: Denys N. Coop. Art direction: Ray Simm. Film editing: Roger Cherrill. Music: Ron Grainer.

What we call "the Fifties" -- including the sexual naïveté and conformity to societal norms -- lasted well into the 1960s, as John Schlesinger's first feature film, A Kind of Loving, demonstrates. It also features Alan Bates in his first starring role as Vic Brown, a young man who lets his hormones and adherence to the values of his working-class family and dreary factory town trap him into a marriage to Ingrid Rothwell, a young woman he quickly falls out of love with. Bates is still a bit green as a film actor -- he hasn't yet developed the sexy bravura that would make him a star in films like Philippe de Broca's King of Hearts (1966), Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969), Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (1971), or Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman (1968) -- but he gives a convincing performance. June Ritchie, who plays the tempting but essentially innocent Ingrid in what was also her debut film, never made it as a big star in an era dominated by the likes of Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave, and Glenda Jackson. The film's villain is Thora Hird as Ingrid's sour, shrewish, widowed mother, who dooms whatever chances the marriage had. The film is a bit slow to start -- it spends too much time on establishing Vic's family and work milieu before settling down to the business of the ill-fated relationship of Vic and Ingrid -- and it's less successful in its portrayal of the postwar British working class than such films as Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).