Filmed in 1968 at the height of the counterculture movement, as the escalation of the Cold War and a seemingly interminable Vietnam War pervaded the collective consciousness of the entire international community, Tony Richardson’s sumptuous, confrontational, and acutely rendered magnum opus, The Charge of the Light Brigade is a scathing indictment, not only of the […]
A silent film-inspired, quick edit, slapstick prologue punctuated by explicative intertitles and a sprightly harpsichord accompaniment sets the irreverent, whimsical tone for Tony Richardson’s freeverse adaptation of Henry Fielding’s beloved eighteenth century novel, Tom Jones, transforming the beloved comedy of manners satire as a giddy fusion of burlesque and Keystone Kops epic adventure. Unfolding as […]
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner opens to the shot of an expressionless, lone runner named Colin Smith (Tom Courtenay) traversing a long, wooded trail as he explains in inner monologue the thoughts and abstractions that occupy a runner’s mind on these vast, empty stretches of road – during these quiet, uninterrupted moments of […]
In some ways, Tony Richardson’s adaptation of Shelagh Delaney debut play, A Taste of Honey anticipates the impassive, world-weary gamin of Robert Bresson’s Mouchette in the way it captures the awkward desperation and inarticulate longing of its foundering, working class heroes. In an early episode in the film, an overly made up, harried, middle-aged woman, […]
On the surface, The Entertainer is something of a cross between Charles Chaplin’s late period film, Limelight in its evocation of an aging, down and out vaudevillian performer seeking to recapture the glory days of his professional career by putting on one last career-defining show, and a prefiguration of Xavier Giannoli’s understatedly rendered The Singer […]
Based on playwright John Osborne’s groundbreaking 1956 play that re-energized London theater with its gritty, unsentimental portrait of the working class and ushered a politically charged, socially conscious literary movement that the critics would collectively dub the “Angry Young Men”, Tony Richardson’s Look Back in Anger bears all the ugliness and unflinching brutality of a […]