Hi there and welcome to Ado's Blog. I am obsessed with nostalgia, especially 1960s & 1970s nostalgia and I enjoy nothing more than reflecting on days and times that have sadly long since gone! So join me, as I take a nostalgic gander down Memory Lane and celebrate all things past and occasional present, both good and bad! (All images used that are copyrighted are copyrighted to their respective publishers and are only used here for review purposes.)
Young flatmates Chrissy and Jo find a stranger, student Chef Robin Tripp, asleep in their bath the morning after the farewell party for their departed flatmate Eleanor. They are taken by Robin, and are especially impressed by his culinary skills at breakfast. Neither Chrissy or Jo can cook, and "Eleanor didn't leave the recipe for toast."
Chrissy and Jo are both from regional England and moved out on their own to live in London. They both work for the same firm. When he meets the girls Robin has been in London two days, having moved from his home town of Southampton to attend college.
The girls are unimpressed with Gabby (Helen Fraser), a pushy young woman who arrives hoping to move in to Eleanor's room. Learning that Robin has been staying at the YMCA they easily convince him to move in.
Robin moves in on a platonic basis, and Chrissy tells the Landlord, George Roper that Robin is gay to pre-empt objections to the mixed-sex living arrangement. In the second episode Robin's true sexuality becomes known to Mildred. Mildred openly flirts with Robin at every opportunity.
Robin frequently acts in a flirtatious manner toward Chrissy and Jo. The women have no romantic interest and spurn his mild advances, and quickly adapt to his presence in the flat.
Landlord George Roper, in truth a sub-letting landlord placed by the council, is a bumbling, accident-prone and gullible man under the thumb of his domineering and sexually-frustrated wife Mildred. Mildred takes out her frustrations with George's lack of class and sexual inadequacy by making suggestive remarks to Robin and frequently siding with the tenants against George. Yet for all their battles the Ropers are a devoted couple.
Robin's friend Larry, a lovable rogue, appears in two first season episodes. In the second season he moves into the loft apartment and is a frequent source of trouble. Another occasional cast member is George's friend, dim schemer Jerry.
Robin's brother Norman Tripp (Norman Eshley) appears through the final season, and starts a romance with Chrissy. Norman Eshley had a previous guest role in the series two years earlier playing a different character, and was also a member of the main cast of the spin-off series, George and Mildred in which he played The Ropers' snobbish neighbour Jeffrey Fourmile.
Tony Richardson's film of Alan Sillitoe's short story intersperses Colin's (Tom Courtenay) life in borstal, where he is encouraged by the Governor to take up running, with flashbacks to the months leading up to his arrest.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was released in 1962, quite late in the new wave cycle. In his memoirs Richardson describes shooting as "a lovefest... I felt free and happy making a film for the first time without constraints."
By contrast with the theatrical basis of Richardson's earlier films Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (1960), the camera is very evident. The 'poetic realist' approach dominates - Colin's runs are shot in an impressionist style and there is an experimental approach to sound, for instance in a scene in which the boys riot in the canteen. Instead of being portrayed naturalistically, everyday scenes are shot in a heightened way reflecting Colin's state of mind and his view of authority.
Volume 29, No.346, November 1962, page 148
Colin Smith is sent to Ruxton Towers, a stately home which has been turned into a Borstal institution. Son of a £9 a week factory worker who died of cancer, Colin is by nature a rebel, an anarchist. His mother splashes the £500 employer's compensation for his father's death on a new carpet and a "telly", then takes up with a fancy man whom Colin loathes. A weekend spent with his friend Mike and a couple of girls at Skegness ends in frayed tempers and a dispiriting return; the exhilaration of the robbery, carried out with Mike's help; the bullying police enquiries and arrest. Colin feels no guilt at finding himself in Borstal, only contempt for Society - an inimical image most strongly embodied for him in the bland, well-meaning presence of the Borstal Governor. The one thing Colin does well is run, and the Governor trains him to win the first long-distance cross-country race ever arranged between the institution and a team of amiable young men from a neighbouring public school. But the Governor's obsessive faith in Colin urges the boy to set up a record not in running but in sheer, basic bloody-mindedness. He runs his rival into the ground then, within striking distance of the tape, stops dead. His victory solitary but sweet, he is sent back to his old, useless job in the workshops, stripping down gas-masks.
Fashionableness can be a fickle, limiting thing for an artist, and needs considerable personal style if his efforts are not only to persuade for the moment but to endure. Tony Richardson's expansion, via the author's own screenplay, of Sillitoe's wiry but tenuous short story is very fashionable indeed. Its protagonist is young, disingenuous, a social outlaw; his environment a mixture of grimy restriction and tantalising, lyrical glimpses of freedom; his gesture of unrelenting war a terse, deliberate refusal to accept Society's conditional offer of integration and the big Step Up - win a race like any self-respecting public school boy; take your chance of fame in the Olympic Games. Richardson, the producer and director, makes his point clearly enough, but at quite a price: bias trailing off into parody, forcefulness impaired by stylistic inconsistency, a dispiriting familiarity of approach.
First, there are the flashbacks, accounting for Colin's present predicament at a length (about half the running time?) in no way justified by their content, which adds up to nothing we haven't seen time and time again in the recent past, or by their uninteresting and laboured presentation (the spending spree done after the style of a TV shopping gazette). The script as a whole has that bitty, desultory, involved construction which is the bane of so much British screenwriting, old and new; every attempt to hide the fact that a tiny anecdote is being spun out leads to the most reactionary longing on the part of the viewer for some solid, dramatic meat of the most old-fashioned kind. Just as fussy are the devices tagged on to some otherwise attractive running scenes - water-reflected shots, upside-down shots, whirling tree-top shots, and the self-indulgent barrage of "thought stream" cut-ins from previous flashbacks during the actual race, a sequence simply crying out for clarity.
The lack of confidence behind this restless tricksiness extends to all sorts of other things. The riot, for instance, is shot in fast, lateral tracking movements back and forth, indicative less of trapped rage on the screen than of panic behind the view-finder. The photographic texture keeps switching from the grainy, pseudo-documentary to the intrusively pretty (much of the open air material). It seems significant that Lassally's camerawork is most effective at its closest and most straightforward, moving in on a fight or observing the subtle irritations of Redgrave's Governor in the face of the inanities of a psychiatrist-housemaster. The sound-track not only plugs ironies like the gap between boys singing Jerusalem and one of their number being chased, caught and probably beaten up; it goes in, in a studied, academic way, for such recently popular devices, à la Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as dialogue preceding image. When these devices step outside the realm of British "new wave" film-making into what can only be described as cribs (though doubtless an homage was intended) from Truffaut's Quatre Cent Coups, one's doubts as to the course Richardson's style is taking reach disquieting proportions. Speeded-up movement, jump-cuts, bits of business with a hat and a typewriter, the interview with the psychiatrist, even if such borrowings were justifiable they would still have to work in themselves in a way they certainly don't here. And, anyway, where is Richardson's own style?
Against this, and a great deal of childishly unacceptable caricature (the concert artists, the pompous TV Tory, elements in Redgrave's sometimes perceptively underplayed Governor), must be set several excellent performances - James Bolam as the friend, almost all the boys (surprisingly enough the public school types are absolutely believable, done with untypical generosity) and Tom Courtenay as Colin. Courtenay displays a surly iconoclasm tempered with humour and intelligence that preserves a much-needed equilibrium between the viewer's sympathy and his natural impatience. His portrait of a sturdy recalcitrance channelled by depressingly unhealthy, hopeless circumstances into something genuinely tragic is exactly right. He persuades, in fact, where the film doesn't. Still, one looks forward to Richardson's next, Tom Jones, with undiminished interest and curiosity.
The Monthly Film Bulletin was published by the British Film Institute between 1934 and 1991. Initially aimed at distributors and exhibitors as well as filmgoers, it carried reviews and details of all UK film releases. In 1991, the Bulletin was absorbed by Sight and Sound magazine.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
| |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Tony Richardson |
| Written by | Alan Sillitoe |
| Starring | Tom Courtenay
Michael Redgrave James Bolam Ray Austin John Thaw Alec McCowen |
| Editing by | Anthony Gibbs |
| Studio | Woodfall Film Productions |
| Distributed by | Continental |
| Release date(s) | 1962 |
| Running time | 104 min |
| Language | English |
Veteran BBC broadcaster and presenter Robert Robinson has died at the age of 83 following a long period of ill health, it has been reported.
Robinson presented numerous radio and television programmes for the Corporation in a career that spanned five decades.
They included Ask the Family, Stop the Week, Call My Bluff and Radio 4's Today programme.
Following his death at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, his daughter, Susie Robinson, told the BBC: "He had a very long, productive and successful life and we'll all miss him terribly."
Robinson was born in Liverpool and went on to study at Oxford University where he met his wife of more than 40 years, the actress Josee Richard.
He began his career in magazines and newspapers, before moving into broadcasting and in 1974 was named Radio Personality of the Year following his tenure on the Today programme.
However, it was hosting quiz shows - what he referred to as his "humble calling" - that most will remember him for.
He was quizmaster on long-running game shows including Radio 4's Brain of Britain and only stood down as chairman of the show last year.
At his retirement the then-Radio 4 controller, Mark Damazer, said: "The brilliant Robert Robinson defined the art of the quiz show host.
"He presided over Brain Of Britain with sympathy for the contestants, wit and panache."
