March 2012 spotlight: British New Wave

TCM is putting the spotlight on the British New Wave films of the 1960s. To me, calling the British films "new wave" seems like a bit of a misnomer, as I get a different feel watching them than I do watching the French New Wave films like Breathless. Perhaps something like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner comes closer, especially if you compare it not to Breathless, but to something like The 400 Blows. I could certainly see the kid in Truffaut's film growing up into the Tom Courtenay character.

Then again, there's also the term "kitchen sink" films for the British movies of the time, and that's a term that seems closer to the mark for me, at least as far as my knowledge of Britain as it was in the early 1960s goes. I commented when I blogged about the movie A Hatful of Rain that there's something about the locations, especially the apartment block, that seems so much more realistic than the studio-bound movies that Hollywood had been making a decade earlier. By the same token, I get the sense that a movie like The Entertainer has a more real look to the apartment scenes than, say, the house in The Ladykillers.

Tonight's schedule starts off with Room at the Top at 8;00 PM, followed by the aforementioned The Entertainer at 10:15 PM.