The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962)

Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Cast: Tom Courtenay, Michael Redgrave, Avis Bunnage, Alec McCowen, James Bolam, Joe Robinson, Dervis Ward, Topsy Jane, Julia Foster. Screenplay: Alan Sillitoe, based on his story. Cinematography: Walter Lassally. Production design: Ralph W. Brinton. Film editing: Antony Gibbs. Music: John Addison.

Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner owes some of its prominence in film history to being grouped with other "Angry Young Men" films, such as Richardson's own Look Back in Anger (1959), Jack Clayton's Room at the Top (1959), Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), and Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963), working-class dramas that gave a boost to such young actors as Richard Burton, Laurence Harvey, Albert Finney, and Richard Harris. Tom Courtenay also got a leg up on his career, largely because he, more than director Richardson, is what holds The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner together. Richardson's direction lacks focus and tension. For example, he occasionally resorts to brief bursts of sped-up action that almost make me hear "Yackety Sax" playing in the background. The essence of Alan Sillitoe's screenplay is that, as Kris Kristofferson put it, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. Courtenay plays Colin Smith, sent to a reformatory, called a Borstal in Britain, for robbery. The oily, autocratic governor of the institution, played by Michael Redgrave, quickly spots Colin's aptitude for running and grooms him for a race he has arranged between teams from the reform school and an upper-class public school. Colin relishes the illusion of freedom that long-distance running gives him, but when the time comes for the race, he realizes that he's just being used by the governor to enhance his image, so he throws the race at the finish line. The bulk of the film deals with Colin's rebellion against the family in which he grew up, his involvement with a young woman, and the small crimes he and a friend commit before he finally gets caught for the theft. But there's not much shape to the film's flashback integration of this background story, and the film falls slack when it should be building to a climax. Still, Courtenay's performance and solid support from Redgrave, from Alec McCowen as a smarmy school counselor full of hack psychology, and from the fine character actress Avis Bunnage as Colin's mother help keep the film alive.

Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963)

Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie in Billy Liar

Cast: Tom Courtenay, Wilfred Pickles, Mona Washbourne, Ethel Griffies, Finlay Currie, Gwendolyn Watts, Helen Fraser, Julie Christie, Leonard Rossiter, Rodney Bewes, George Innes, Leslie Randall. Screenplay: Keith Waterhouse, Willis Hall, based on a novel by Waterhouse and a play by Waterhouse and Hall. Cinematography: Denys N. Coop. Art direction: Ray Simm. Film editing: Roger Cherrill. Music: Richard Rodney Bennett. 

Tom Courtenay's performance as a Yorkshire Baron Munchausen and Julie Christie's smallish role as the former girlfriend who almost rescues him from a life of boredom and mendacity went a long way toward establishing them as major British stars of the 1960s. Courtenay's about-face from the seriousness of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962) to the comedy of Billy Liar singled him out as an actor of great versatility. Christie would follow her role as the devil-may-care Liz by winning an Oscar for another John Schlesinger film, Darling (1965), in which she revealed the unhappy emptiness behind the façade of celebrity. But they're hardly the only fine performances in this exploration of the consequences of tedium in a provincial town where London looms like Moscow in Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Mona Washbourne and Wilfred Pickles are Billy Fisher's exasperated parents, Ethel Griffies his garrulous grandmother, and Gwendolyn Watts and Helen Fraser are the highly contrasting young women Billy has managed to get himself engaged to -- one of his less disastrous escapes into his fantasy world. It's a comedy with an edge, but it never lets that edginess overwhelm the comedy, keeping a nice balance of both. I'm not a big fan of Schlesinger's more celebrated films Darling and Midnight Cowboy (1969), in which I think he loses control of the tone too often, but Billy Liar seems to me to get it just right.

45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)

Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling in 45 Years

Kate Mercer: Charlotte Rampling
Geoff Mercer: Tom Courtenay
Lena: Geraldine James
Sally: Dolly Wells
George: David Sibley

Director: Andrew Haigh
Screenplay: Andrew Haigh
Based on a story by David Constantine
Cinematography: Lol Crawley

Even in the longest marriages, couples still have something they can never share: those years before they met. Old failures, old loves, old sorrows are locked in the minds of each partner. This is the stuff of which stories are made, perhaps most brilliantly in James Joyce's story "The Dead." Fiction has ways of dealing with the emotional tension imposed on the present by a past that movies can't quite evoke except, conventionally, by flashbacks. Fortunately, Andrew Haigh doesn't do anything so conventional in 45 Years, his adaptation of the story "In Another Country" by David Constantine. Instead, he trusts his actors to carry the burden, revealing in the cinematic present the effects of the unshown past. Kate and Geoff are about to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary with a big party they had originally planned, we learn, for their 40th anniversary. It had to be postponed when Geoff went in the hospital for a coronary bypass. As they sit at the kitchen table a few days before the party, discussing the music they want played -- Geoff thinks it would be "kind of naff," i.e., corny, to play the Platters' "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," which they danced to at their wedding -- he opens a letter he has received from Switzerland. The body of a woman he traveled with, more than 50 years ago, has been found preserved in glacial ice. He's intrigued and disturbed by the discovery, including the fact that she would still look the way she did in her 20s, whereas he is old and gray. Geoff has never told Kate much about Katya and her death, so as the days go by and he continues to be obsessed by the news, she begins to pry information out of him and eventually makes her own discovery: that when she fell to her death Katya was pregnant. Haigh's determined restraint as a storyteller shines here. We never hear the truth spoken by any of the characters -- Kate doesn't confront Geoff with what she learns -- but only witness Kate as, looking through Geoff's things in the attic, she finds a cache of old slides. As she projects them on a sheet, we see what she sees: Katya with a contented look as she places her hand on her protruding belly. Because we know that Kate and Geoff are childless, this revelation has an even greater emotional impact. The tension between husband and wife grows, born of Kate's inquisitiveness and Geoff's reluctance to open himself up, but voices are scarcely raised. Fortunately, Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay are more than equal to the task of showing how this half-century-old secret affects their lives. That we remember the catlike young Rampling, with her ice-blue eyes and wide sensuous mouth, and the weedy, angry young man that Courtenay often played also helps us contemplate the passage of time as we project those images onto the aging actors on the screen. Haigh ends on a masterstroke: Although Kate and Geoff have seemingly come to terms with the past, and he gives a speech at the party proclaiming his love for her, she has overruled his criticism and chosen "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" for their lead-off dance. And as the Jerome Kern-Otto Harbach song ends, we realize along with Kate, left alone on the dance floor, that she has chosen a song about lost love to celebrate their anniversary.

Showtime