look back in anger review
film by Tony Richardson (1959)
There’s a moment in the impish Red Hangover Walkabout—street name is Disco Elysium—where the player can select from the dialogue tree “Are women bourgeois?” and directly below it: “Oh god, that’s bad. Surely I can think of something better.” Look Back In Anger is 98 minutes in the craggy vantage point of someone who sincerely believes in the former. As class interrogation, it’s nothing astounding; as Prurient Emotional Devastation Pornography, it’s unforgettable.
Review by: James Carneiro | Filed Under: Film Reviews
May 09, 2025
BFI retrospectives often classify The Angry Young Men and Kitchen Sink Realism / British New Wave as mustard-y, academic, a cultural interstitial bookended by (it’s heavily implied more exciting!) Powell-Pressburger on one end, Swinging London Sex Farce on the other. I disagree. This is some 60% hornier and 78% more visually inventive than either “book.” What can you say; Tony Richardson knew there’s nothing more beautiful than sweating through a theatrical glower, the cruelest thing imaginable flitting about your lips, the flickering swinging bulb scorching like a klieg.
Jimmy and Alison Porter are something of an Odd Couple. This is less due to class cleavage than Jimmy (Richard Burton, prematurely aged beyond comprehension) being a loquacious sociopath and Alison (Mary Ure, who at least does not Suffering Housewife quietly) being a fairly anodyne Oxbridge woman. Jimmy is a fascinating sociological monstrosity—a man from a brutally poor background who attended university, caught a glimpse of Affluent Intellectual Bohemianism, but is relegated to drunken blarings at jazz clubs between stints selling 3rd-hand merchandise at Eastend market stalls.
He has the barest concept of class consciousness—Did you know Tory snobs enunciate funnily? Damn homie, you must be Engels for the Atomic Age!—but it really doesn’t matter because it’s sublimated through so many eel sandwich layers of egotism and misogyny any progressive direction is rendered necrotic, hidebound, embarrassing.
But this isn’t Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It ain’t a twofer, it’s a quartet, which makes things vastly more interesting. Cliff (Gary Raymond) is Jimmy’s prime accomplice and enabler, which he “cancels out” via tender reckonings with Women in the Wreckage, all done in a Welsh brogue, clotted as pork fat in split pea soup, unseemly as mayonnaise in a Dagwood with the consistency/odor of bull semen. Cliff pretends he’s disturbed by Jimmy’s psychic defenestrations, his lazy cruelty, his debate club grandstanding. But whenever he does Punch & Judy routines with Jimmy, the Welsher’s tones mingle with the Stentorian Working Class Hero, their muscles sync in time, and to our horror, we realize: Sweet Christ, Cliff loves Jimmy more than Jimmy loves himself. Oh God. Oh god.
Helena Charles (Claire Bloom, a dearly needed fount of feminine counterpoint) whirls into the flat as The Second Boarder. She is everything Alison is not; strong willed, burbling with riposte, completely intransigent to Jimmy’s emotional-spatial tyranny. She ricochets Jimmy’s dorm room devastations back at him, with interest. She correctly groks Jimmy’s wit as not coming from a place of power, but weakness; he is still the insecure, soppy-souled adolescent as he was when the Eton prefect laughed at his clothing selection and his response was: “How can I dress to make them not laugh at me? How can I emulate them? I hate myself; how can I hate myself in less embarrassing ways? Can I find class empowerment in demeaning those I sleep with?” Yes, yes, yes.
Jimmy Porter is a monster, yes, but he undergoes a personality shift when he moves from Alison to Helena. He switches from doormat to firebrand. It makes him a better person, I think, because his sublimated Class Jealousy has to bounce off someone who Talks Back. Helena is a sounding board, a megaphone, an interactive dialogue tree which (justifiably) hates you. Jimmy can no longer be an emotional dictator, he must reckon with and supplicate another autonomous being.
For the first time, we are displayed with an eroticism which feels natural, equal, Not Depressing. When Cliff comes home one besotted evening, his eyebrows twitch at the erotic door wedge light emanating from the bedroom; he understands something irreversible has happened. Sex generated from passivity cannot generate such light. It’s libidinally impossible.
This is the most Eastenders film I’ve ever seen. Diegetic sound contains Roma, Yiddish, Sicilian, Mussolini’s Italian, Greek, Arabic, The Eternal Cockney Brogue. It might be the least rhotic soundscape I’ve ever experienced. I wanted to hear each and every ambient monologue through a Smithsonian-level curation recording. The eel guts and the wafting rye and the cavorting turmeric—it hits, and it roosts on your bloody tongue. Whenever I think of the East End, my tongue bleeds like a Jawbreaker song. So sour. So loquacious.
Is Jimmy Porter a Working Class Hero? No, but the film slides a number of Too Easy Arguments at our shuffleboard feet. Jimmy is
A) Is genuinely in love with Ma Tanner, the only women he’ll ever truly love—and it must be said plainly!—because she is menopausal, postsexual, and therefore lovable because she cannot experience libidinal pleasure. Jimmy can only respect women who are barren.
B) “Goes to the mat” for Kapoor, the Indian market stall neighbor constantly bedeviled by racist market bureaucrats, out of a misplaced sense of justice—Kapoor is equally befuddled by Jimmy’s class misalignment, he mistrusts his brusque attempts at camaraderie—and it’s all resolved peachily.
This may be John Osborne’s baby, but (thankfully) it’s Tony Richardson’s project. This film is less concerned with Angry Young Men than Righteously Potent Beings. It cares little for Poor Boys Who Flail Too Much; it takes stock in Enduring Struggling Social Creatures. I hated Jimmy so much. I identified with Helena frighteningly.
Jimmy is as much a Working Class Hero as Churchill was a champion of council house interests; he pretended. He lied. He genuflects at concepts he never committed to. He’s an actor! He’s a reprobate! He’s scribbling a novelization of the movie adaption in the cocktail napkin on the set of A Film To Which He’ll Never Be Invited. A walk-on role for a B-part near the rear-end of a market stall quack-up. It’s all quite sad. Does Rubber Soul come out this year or next?
The trouble with self-styled working class egotists is their class hate tends to land upon The Laziest Targets; lovers, flat mates, mothers-in-law, fellow grubby proletarians. Structural critique gets lost in the florid sophistry, the grandiloquence of their Etonian monologuing performed in dank, stagnant water closets. (For whose benefit is it performed?)
There’s a Red Hangover haunting my Essex Dogs. Women aren’t bourgeois, but Jimmy certainly is.
Author
Reviewed by James Carneiro. Initially caught the film bug while cruising for used copies of Bergman flicks/bootleg concert footage at Disc Replay. These days, he’ll review quite anything, though he is partial to Italian neorealism, American underground film, and whoever is using cinema as a method of interrogating power structures. You can follow him on Letterboxd and Twitter.
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