The Wrong Rogue

It’s a truism that films rarely reproduce a novel’s rich texture. From that chest of buried treasure it grabs but a few gold coins. Worse: there are times the film changes, even falsifies, a novel’s theme. Maybe the director misses the obvious; or finds its truth too difficult to accept, too painful to portray. Thus Capitalism dominates this Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Karel Reisz is a politico. It’s why he gets Arthur Seaton wrong.

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The middle classes love their agitprop; it reduces the complexity of a world they’ve been educated to believe is simple, so allowing them to make decisions, take command, order others about. A few lines in the newspaper. Some concept knocked around the room. To us it seems too easy, a bit slapdash. Often no more than a glance and they know what to do. Life reduced to a game with its few clear rules and symbols. The middle-class. They love their conceptual shuttlecocks! And they make a nice pair, in their neat shorts and tiny skirts, dancing each side of the net. So sweet, lovely….

This is a film of aesthetic beauty, yet the director wants to tell an ugly tale; a parable, you know, about the times, about that awful Capitalism. Alas, he is no Robert Louis Stevenson, who, like that proverbial Bottle Imp, can make the poor rich, liven up the stale, and transform a conventional fable into an original work of art: transported to Polynesia, that Imp to plant churches on desert islands, and convert beautiful palaces in Hell’s waiting-room. You see where Stevenson is going? Christianity, by devaluing the present, makes us fearful of the future, so destroying our peace of mind. Alas, Karel Reisz sides with the ecclesiastics. He prefers to preach rather than learn from the pleasures of others. Gauguin frowns; he bridles, he gets his fists out….

What is Reisz’s sermon?

Work is a hard slog that wears us down. Even young Arthur, who promises always to resist, gives up at the end. For the lad is young. He is deluded. A chump. Just like all the rest. Arthur Seaton lives too much in the moment to realise that the moment cannot last long. He doesn't notice that the freewheeling life has a sell-by date. 

It is the last scene on a hillside; with that house builder’s sign in a field’s corner. The hill colonised by houses. It makes Arthur sad. He soliloquises on their shared past, how he once collected it’s blackberries. Doreen hardly listens. She dreams of the future; thinking of those houses marching up the slope, and how she’ll enlist in its militia, her own domestic army. Arthur stops talking. Doreen: until we can afford to buy a house we’ll live with mum. Her lover throws a stone at the housing estate. She asks him why, warns him not to do it again. Arthur’s reply: I felt like it. Then adds: I won’t stop throwing stones, but it won’t be often. This lad needs to rebel (or he needs the idea of rebellion) even though his acts are absurd. This pleases Doreen, for it suggests a child, easily managed. They get up and walk down the hill hand-in-hand. The credits roll. His freedom just a memory now.

Arthur is a rough but clever lower working-class lad; Doreen a prim upper working-class woman. She has cast many spells - her beauty, her figure, her refined ways - and he is spellbound by her magic. Yet this spellbinder, with her beauty and enigmatic attitude, is but a conventional girl who wants marriage and her own home; costly items allowing little time for liberty. Arthur knows this, but cannot escape her charms. He can only dream the rebel dream; make the odd, stupid gesture. The good life buried in the past.

Arthur is an ordinary bloke who hasn’t grown up quite as quickly as his mates. Even after starting work he remains a late adolescent; thus that sense of freedom and anarchic fun; the schoolboy games in factory - leaving a dead rat on a woman’s workstation - and pub: drinking a sailor under the table. He thinks teenage time can last forever, although when pressed by Robboe he admits he will marry when the right woman pops up. But I’ll keep my liberty. Always to fight the gaffers, the TV companies, the officials and their nonsensical rules. A youth’s illusion. Arthur is avoiding the central square. Forever running around the alleyways of this town, bypassing its main streets. Shooting Mrs Bull up the arse with a pellet gun; helping a man resist arrest; shagging Brenda behind her husband’s back; such high jinks are accepted only because of his age, a remnant of his adolescence. In a few years’ time such behaviour will become tiresome, be deplored. Of course Arthur doesn’t see it this way; cannot see how narrow are those alleys; that many lead nowhere…. It why he discourses on the weak character of the men around him, how they’ve given up to circumstance. What a kid! Circumstance shapes every life, only the exceptional to transcend it. Sorry Arthur, you’re no genius. Soon these alleyways will be full of teenagers, and there won’t be room for you to run. Forced out onto the street…. A policeman calls at the house and warns Arthur not to shoot Mrs Bull again. Brenda becomes pregnant and their affair is exposed; its end violent and salutary: Arthur’s pride is hurt. A hero no longer. At last he must leave the cinema…. Though more vital than his mates - the reason he remains younger longer - he is little different from them. He is no rebel. A parasite, rather, on the very ‘system’ he complains about. Living off the time borrowed from his extended youth, itself a product of high wages and his parent’s comfortable existence. It is a lark. And he has the money to pay for its ill consequences: he pays for Brenda’s abortion.1 Such times cannot last. Over the years the factory will sap his youthful energy. He will lose his friends to the marriage bed. The pull of his own wife and family will be too strong. Of course he must lose his liberty. Doreen’s delicate hand a dainty handcuff fastened to Arthur’s wrist.

The film could have been an elegy for a special period of post-war life: those years between (say) 17 and 25 when man and boy merge and part ways. To grow is to acquire freedom, and then to learn to give it up. The novel’s motif, although obscured by the vitality of its hero (on the page Arthur is more odd and alive than on celluloid).

You disagree?

It is true that Karel Reisz shows him sleeping with a married woman. But only a crazy man sleeps with two married women at the same time, and believes this a good idea, his own contraceptive device. The anarchic quality in Arthur’s persona is lost in the movie, whose strongest feeling is that of the lugubrious. There is a climate of depression. The factory a brooding presence, those chimney stacks cover Arthur and his mates in gloom. This film saturated with images of industrial England, which now gives it an elegiac atmosphere. Not so at the time. Today they look like mysterious fortresses; then they’d have looked like grim workhouses. Such a powerful presence. Always Arthur is waiting for their hooter call. Even on Sunday he’s thinking about that production-line; Monday the great beast that haunts his weekends. Yet the novel is called Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. And between its covers work hardly gets a look in. Saturday the sun around which the planets of Arthur’s week revolve. Thus his early declaration of intent: all that matters is fun, the rest is propaganda. Reisz shifts the emphasis. Not sex. Not bedroom farce. Not even violence. No, it is the factory that is this film’s maître d’.

It is not so. Work is much better than it was; only the supervisors looking back to the “good ole days”. For one thing it is better paid. So many things to buy, while the parents don’t have to pocket Arthur’s wages. It’s why he can forget the factory when he walks out of the gates on Friday. In the 1950s work meant freedom not exploitation. Reisz stuck in ancient times as he shoots a new world….

Only the present moment matters for Arthur. The future? That’s for others, for Brenda to worry about; those next nine months when her clothes won’t fit and she’ll feel unattractive. A few months on she must look beyond that growing bump…is a few hours of heavenly happiness really worth such a lifetime’s load? An adult speaks. Maturity is to think outside one’s present self. A wonderful shot shows Arthur absorbing the truth of Brenda’s words. He’s made a mistake, and knows it. Some of that boy in him is lost.

Arthur and Doreen prepare to make love at home. They fool her mother by calling out bye bye, then slamming the door; hoping those ears will hear footsteps fading through the street. They return to the living room, where Doreen sits on the sofa and Arthur wanders by the window. The atmosphere is tense. It’s judgement time. For though in love, they are  yet to cross the psychological rubicon that will make them a permanent couple: sex the superglue bonding them for good. The tension increases. They have to decide; their bodies demand a decision…Arthur walks about. Doreen rests her head on the sofa’s back. So tense, unsure, are they wavering…. Arthur is holding Doreen, they kiss, fumbling on the sofa suddenly they are falling to the floor. The director respectfully cuts to a new scene.

There was never a doubt of Arthur’s surrender. Doreen is too beautiful and too determined to fail. It is the old story, one where the Garden of Eden buds not flowers and trees but houses and factories. And with different scenery the meaning changes. Not to leave the leisure class for a lifetime’s toil, for Arthur works already, but to give up those wild weekends for domestic duty. Home the great trap for young men.

Reisz is uneasy with this traditional tale. He wants the workplace - not Woman - to be Satan’s servant; the factory the evil villain of this movie. But is work really so bad? In the novel Arthur enjoys his job, his imagination left free to find its own wild garden. Arthur Seaton. Alan Sillitoe. The initials tell their own story: Arthur is an artist manqué. Karel Reisz will have none of this. He believes in the Working-Class. Arthur just another young lad, though with more spirit than most, to be ground down like the rest. That Devil Capitalism. Oh, I know Arthur complains, but don’t take this seriously Karel. Bombast, a bit of showing off; he wants to wind father up, to assert his independence. Are you comprehending Mr Director? No. You are outside this world; you hear his talk but do not pay proper attention to his actions, where the real meaning lies. In truth, when people moan about a thing it is often a sign they love it. Factories: the best thing in town after a good night out with a woman.

Review:  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

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1.  In the film it is unsuccessful - the moral climate of the movies more severe than that of literature.