The rise of a ‘new wave’ in British cinema should be welcomed, but it is still too soon to venture any more than a provisional estimate of its achievement. The two most gifted exponents of the movement—the directors Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson—have so far made just one film each, and it may be that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz) and This Sporting Life (Anderson) have had more praise than they deserve. The lacklustre history of British cinema has understandably made critics indulgent of any director who challenges the narrow outlook of the film industry.

From its beginnings, world cinema has been dominated, culturally and economically, by the United States. The first sound film was American. The first colour film was American. Almost every talented European director has spent some time working in the us, many remaining there permanently. Even Eisenstein went there to shoot ¡Que viva Mexico! Few European films have penetrated the American market, while the rest of the world has long been awash with us output. Initially, German film appeared a potential rival. But heavy American investment in the German industry, combined, of course, with the ascent of Nazism, dealt with that challenge. Almost all its major directors—Murnau, Lang, Ophüls—emigrated across the Atlantic. German cinema never recovered.

British cinema has remained more subordinate to America than any other. In France, Italy and Japan, the linguistic difference and—in general—the lesser extent of American cultural and economic penetration allowed the development of a more autonomous cinema. Moreover, some masters—Renoir, Rossellini and Mizoguchi—remained at home despite the rupture of the War. Britain, by contrast, gave Hitchcock to Hollywood. But if the uk’s cinema emerged as an appendix of America’s, it simultaneously developed an attitude of naïve provincialism. This was a completely commercial cinema, in the American manner, unquestioning in its respect for the ‘star’ system, valuation by audience size and formulaic subject matter. Yet it sought to free itself from this by reasserting a distinctively British character. While the American cinema was genuinely American, catering for a public whose cultural identity was still coalescing—developing in a reciprocal relationship between spectator and director—British cinema sought to graft a caricature of Britishness onto its imitation of American cinema, one which pandered to the dilapidated sentimentality of its public.

During the 1950s, American cinema confronted a deepening crisis, accompanied by the rise of television. Production was drastically reduced. The industry placed its hopes in grandiose, wasteful super-productions, culminating in Cleopatra. As a result, the possibility of a relatively low-budget, quality cinema emerged in Europe. Ingmar Bergman was first on the scene. Then in 1958, French cinema took the lead. Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, Hiroshima, mon amour by Resnais and Godard’s À bout de souffle showcased a whole range of new possibilities. In Italy, Antonioni achieved worldwide fame, and neo-realism was brought up to date. The growing shortage of new American films gave impetus to these ‘new waves’. In France, experimental films began to circulate in mainstream venues, helped by the country’s quasi-anarchic distribution system. In Britain, however, two monolithic distributors, Rank and abc, persisted in their conservatism. It seemed that British cinema would be left behind.

Finally, in 1960, new horizons opened up. This was due not to any change of heart on the part of producers and distributors, but to the success of a new group of playwrights and novelists. With one bestseller or box-office hit after another, film adaptations of the group’s work became an attractive proposition. Warner Brothers supported the recently-formed film company Woodfall, enabling Tony Richardson to make Look Back in Anger, based on John Osborne’s play. (Richardson had been its stage director.) John Braine’s novel Room at the Top was directed by Jack Clayton, with Simone Signoret bringing great emotional force to her role, winning an Oscar for her performance. Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, adapted from Alan Sillitoe’s novel, was an unexpected box-office success for Rank. Richardson followed this with A Taste of Honey, adapted from Shelagh Delaney’s successful stage play, and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, another adaptation from Sillitoe. The British ‘new wave’ had arrived.

The literary and theatrical antecedents of the new British cinema set it apart from its French and Italian equivalents. While the new French directors wrote their own scripts, or at least worked from material written specifically for the cinema, the British relied on adaptations—from a narrow and fairly homogeneous set of writers. It is therefore not easy to separate the distinguishing qualities of the new cinema from those of the new theatre or new novel. British cinema has not produced directors with a deep cinematic culture like Godard or Truffaut, Rivette or Rohmer, developed through their work at Cahiers du cinéma. Before they had any chance of making films, these French directors had conceptualized an understanding of film’s history and an aesthetics of cinematography that accorded great importance to mise-en-scène and acknowledged in particular the formal and stylistic achievements of the major American directors. Samuel Fuller’s influence on À bout de souffle or George Cukor’s on Une femme est une femme is altogether evident.

The new British directors, it should be said, also began as critics and theorists. Reisz, Richardson and Anderson all took part in the Free Cinema movement of the 1940s, and Anderson was a co-founder of the journal Sequence. The emphasis, however, was always on the need to develop cinema’s social conscience. This sensibility was already present in the watchword they adopted (‘the poetry of the everyday’). They found it hard to conceive of its transformation in audio-visual terms without the ornament of an essentially literary idea and plot. The directors had not developed original ideas or found a style for transforming literary material into something cinematographically valid. Reisz himself came to admit that ‘our films lack style and imagination, with the result that so far they have been works of small account—with no sense of the urgency of an exceptional personality’. The British ‘new wave’ is therefore vulnerable to the charge that its primary interest is sociological, that it presents not a new idea of cinema but a new range of subjects and milieux.