Country: UK
Director: Tony Richardson
From time to time national cinemas seem to experience bursts of creativity that result in concentrated periods of inspired output. To my mind the British film industry had two such "golden ages." One was the 1940s, when directors like David Lean, Carol Reed, and Michael Powell turned out one masterpiece after another. The other was the 1960s, when the young directors of the British New Wave like Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz (all of whom turned to directing after stints as critics at Sight and Sound), Bryan Forbes, and John Schlesinger made their greatest films. These young filmmakers were inspired both by the freedom of style of their French New Wave counterparts and by the politicized class-consciousness of the "Angry Young Man" writers like John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, and Harold Pinter.
The most productive of these filmmakers during this time was Tony Richardson. Although like the rest of his contemporaries he eventually moved on to more mainstream projects, he directed no less than five notable British New Wave films between 1959 and 1963, when he won an Oscar for directing Tom Jones. The classic films of the British New Wave focus on alienated young men played by the likes of Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Tom Courtenay. Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961) is one of the few films to come out of the movement whose main character is a young woman.
