• It’s British New Wave (clearly Richardson from Look Back in Anger, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner) taking on some of the style of the French New Wave- mainly Truffaut
  • One of the best edited films of the 1960’s- the editing is a character
  • Academy Award wins for picture, writer, director and score
  • First of 5 noms for Finney
  • Finney was one of the go-to first faces on the acting side of the British New Wave- Saturday Night and Sunday Morning– 1960—he’s also a small role in Richardson’s The Entertainer
  • It updates Henry Fielding’s for the modern generation—not quite like Sofia Coppola did with Marie Antoinette or Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet but in a similar vein
  • Opens with titles and dialogue-less like a silent film then the omniscient voice-over with a sense of humor winking at the audience saying things like “we’ll leave such scenes (sex scene) for decency and decorum”
  • Film debut for David Warner
  • Prestige period picture/adaptation-but we have comic organ cues for laughing, reflexivity talking to the camera
  • Great comic actors like Peter Bull and Hugh Griffith
  • Keystone cops-like broad comedy—fast-motion in one sequence,
  • Wipe editing, freeze frame, it’s wild—the narrative movies and the transitions are genius—Iris in later, very- Truffaut Shoot the Piano Player
  • It’s editing is far superior to any of the five films nominated in that category in 1963
  • Richardson directs the hell out this thing
  • Hugh Griffith was apparently a handful on set- always drunk—I can only say that his performance is excellent- it matches the style of the editing and pace with perfection
  • Finney is superb- a bounder—adventurer and folk hero—grinning in most shots
  • The freeze frame of Susanna York looking at the camera—long silent sequence after
  • The eating chicken foreplay scene is great
  • Lines like “civilization my trunk” by Griffith at a costume part wearing an elephant costume
  • Freeze-frame jump cutting as two eavesdrop on a door
  • Freeze frame final shot—years before Butch Cassidy (1969), though four years after The 400 Blows
  • MS