"Kitchen Sink" drama was in its ascendancy when this film adaptation of John Osborne's play was transferred to the screen in 1959.
Philosophically, it's very much in keeping with the conventional, (and by now extremely predictable) views of the counterculture, then viewed through the prism of "the beats" but ten years after through the prism of the hippies.
Thus, we have Richard Burton, playing a young man, (a role for which he is already far too old as he looks very middle aged here) who has chosen to eke out an existence as a street vendor of penny candy by day.
By night, he is an amateur musician and misanthrope, drowning in an ocean of self pity which he assuages with alcohol and wife beating.
His apartment is regulation 1959 degradation model A-1, with girlie pin ups for art, the ironing board in the middle of the room, last weeks newspapers piled everywhere, and walls as pock marked as his un-pancaked oily complexion.
Oh, and he has a wife, a platinum blonde, whom he slaps around, and who, discovers she is expecting in one of the film's climactic revelations.
But pending fatherhood is no reason to remain faithful, and, thus, when his wife, unable to tolerate more abuse, returns to her parental home, he takes up with a visiting actress.
That the actress is played by the exquisitely cultivated and beauteous Claire Bloom strains credibility to the breaking point, (why would she put up with such as this?).
And it is to Miss Bloom that he directs some of Osborne's more pungent counter cultural observations--blaming those bloody Edwardians with their Rupert Brooke notions of honor, duty, propriety and respectability who mucked up everything--got it all wrong--it's more honest to live in a flea bitten flop-house and play amateur trumpet by night.
Then there's his free love advocacy:, "you can't be both a saint and live--you have to choose one or the other." Did you hear that St. Thomas More? This achingly relevant study of a man in extended childhood, though technically well executed, is as tedious and false as its underlying and very bankrupt philosophy.
Philosophically, it's very much in keeping with the conventional, (and by now extremely predictable) views of the counterculture, then viewed through the prism of "the beats" but ten years after through the prism of the hippies.
Thus, we have Richard Burton, playing a young man, (a role for which he is already far too old as he looks very middle aged here) who has chosen to eke out an existence as a street vendor of penny candy by day.
By night, he is an amateur musician and misanthrope, drowning in an ocean of self pity which he assuages with alcohol and wife beating.
His apartment is regulation 1959 degradation model A-1, with girlie pin ups for art, the ironing board in the middle of the room, last weeks newspapers piled everywhere, and walls as pock marked as his un-pancaked oily complexion.
Oh, and he has a wife, a platinum blonde, whom he slaps around, and who, discovers she is expecting in one of the film's climactic revelations.
But pending fatherhood is no reason to remain faithful, and, thus, when his wife, unable to tolerate more abuse, returns to her parental home, he takes up with a visiting actress.
That the actress is played by the exquisitely cultivated and beauteous Claire Bloom strains credibility to the breaking point, (why would she put up with such as this?).
And it is to Miss Bloom that he directs some of Osborne's more pungent counter cultural observations--blaming those bloody Edwardians with their Rupert Brooke notions of honor, duty, propriety and respectability who mucked up everything--got it all wrong--it's more honest to live in a flea bitten flop-house and play amateur trumpet by night.
Then there's his free love advocacy:, "you can't be both a saint and live--you have to choose one or the other." Did you hear that St. Thomas More? This achingly relevant study of a man in extended childhood, though technically well executed, is as tedious and false as its underlying and very bankrupt philosophy.