IIn the 1959 film’s opening scene of Look Back in Anger, Richard Burton, as “angry” icon Jimmy Porter, establishes his nonconformist references by indulging in a sweaty jazz trumpet freakout while local youth are in a frenzy nearby romps around. The scene is an invention of the filmmakers – the original play takes place entirely in a single cramped top-floor apartment – but that borrowed from Porter’s penchant for playing a trumpet off-stage to tease everyone.
Well, it was a smart move by filmmakers – director Tony Richardson and writer Nigel Kneale – to combine their groundbreaking essay on the realism of Kitchen Sinking with Trad Jazz, at the height of its popularity in the UK. Chris Barber’s death this week is a reminder that the band we briefly see in Look Back in Anger (the movie) are Barbers Jazz Band, who made a massive chart hit earlier that year with Petite Fleur would have. This is Barber himself honking his bones next to Burton and the band’s actual trumpeter Pat Halcox shaking hands with Burton as he comes off the stage.
Smart move … Burton and trumpet in a commercial for Look Back in Anger. Photo: Ronald Grant
At that distance, it’s a bit difficult to gauge how central trad jazz was to youth culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s, but British cinema’s connections to barbers are illuminating. A few years later, Barber and his band would be the headline for the 1962 cash-in. It’s Trad, Dad !, which was released just before the coup de grace of the Merseybeat bands. (The Beatles’ Love Me Do hit the top 10 later that year) It’s Trad, Dad! is by no means a great movie: with a plot thinner than Acker Bilk’s ties, it’s basically a series of promo spots for musical acts that, along with a yarn that top-charted Helen Shapiro and Craig Douglas are lined up. But it is the directorial debut of future New Wave star Richard Lester, who fills out the Nothing script with a whole range of tricks: time-lapse, rewind, meta-voice-over, funny miniatures, even a pudding pie from off-screen.
At the other end of the British new wave boom, Look Back in Anger is helping to stimulate British cinema attempts to catch up with its French and Italian counterparts. Richardson had directed the original stage production in 1956, so was well placed to direct the film adaptation. This important opening scene, great as it is, is really an upscaling of something else that Richardson had already experimented on: the amazing short film Momma Don’t Allow, which he made with Karel Reisz and which was shot in the winter of 1954/55 and who saw the light of day in 1956 as part of the groundbreaking Free Cinema program.
Momma Don’t Allow is available for free on the BFI player, and it’s something else too now. Just over 20 minutes long, it’s a recording of an evening at the Wood Green Jazz Club, AKA the Fishmongers Arms on Wood Green High Road. Richardson and Reisz came up with the brilliant idea of following a couple of local kids – a butcher boy, a dental assistant, a railroad car cleaner – from their boring day jobs to the excitement of the night, from the band setting up their instruments to the strapless mayhem on the dance floor until exhaustion at the end of the evening.
Though the teens and twenties clearly know they are being filmed, Momma Don’t Allow is an amazingly unfiltered expression of youth culture of the time. In contrast to We Are the Lambeth Boys, the later Reisz film, with which he is often in brackets, it is not a pure documentary. Richardson and Reisz worked together to construct a beautifully modulated multi-thread narrative. A group of Slumming-It-Blue-Bloods show up and almost start a fight. The dental assistant is seething with jealousy when her boyfriend appears to be dating another girl. The train cleaner – and her frankly impressive dance moves – become the subject of competition between a group of likely boys.
Barber and his band’s music, which spans the entire soundtrack, still features Lonnie Donegan at this point, who was about to begin and forge his own stellar career in Skiffle, Trades DIY cousin. In one bold move there is no dialogue; No doubt about it, because it was much more expensive and difficult to get a sync sound and maintain a sense of authenticity. (The cameraman was another future giant: Walter Lassally, who shot Tom Jones, Heat and Dust and won an Oscar for Zorba the Greek.)
Momma Don’t Allow was the beginning of great things for the filmmakers. Unfortunately, none of the kids are featured in the credits, so it’s hard to know if they’re really raw locals or cleverly positioned young actors. A little disappointing is that the creative energy and unconventional thinking that was shown in Momma Don’t Allow or the other Free Cinema shorts – including Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland and Lorenza Mazzetti’s Together – never really made it into the British New’s feature films Wave, which remained much more conservative and cinematically shy than their French and Italian counterparts. Momma Don’t Allow, however, is the real thing: In homage to Barber, it can’t be improved upon; But it’s just awesome no matter how you look at it.
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