The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Tony Richardson (1962)
Alan Sillitoe wrote the screenplay for this adaptation of his short story of the same name but the film’s characterisation of its protagonist, Colin Smith, is confused. Tony Richardson and Sillitoe keep changing their mind – for the sake of instant dramatic impact – about whether Colin is typical of his generation and social group or is different from his working-class contemporaries (and hence ‘lonely’). Colin arrives at Ruxton Towers, a borstal. The narrative describes his life there, his aptitude for running and the preparations for a five-mile race, in which the borstal lads take on the boys from Ranley, a nearby public school. Interspersed with this story is a series of flashbacks to Colin’s earlier life in Nottingham, leading up to his robbing a bakery with his friend, Mike – it’s this that lands Colin in Ruxton Towers. Earlier in the backstory, he and Mike take a couple of girls, Audrey and Gladys, on a trip to Skegness. On the beach there, Colin recalls a family visit to Skegness when he was a boy. He tells Audrey that ‘when I was a kid I kept trying to get lost – then I realised I couldn’t get lost’. This suggests precocious existential or, at least, social consciousness on Colin’s part and, although he and Mike are partners in petty crime, we can see how unalike they are – how dissatisfied with his life Colin is, compared to his friend. But his feelings about the impending race against the Ranley boys are kept under wraps until the last few yards of the five-mile run. Colin is well ahead and assured of victory. Visited by a stream of consciousness montage of key remarks and images from earlier in the film, he appears to realise only in the nick of time that, if he wins, he’ll gratify the borstal governor and be collaborating with the establishment enemy. He stops and throws the race.
Thanks to his slight physique, Tom Courtenay, twenty-five at the time, is convincingly younger as Colin. (In contrast, John Thaw, although he was only twenty, looks anomalously mature in the group of borstal boys.) From the start – in interviews with the governor and a foolish would be-psychoanalyst among the borstal staff – Courtenay suggests that Colin Smith’s cocky rebelliousness is the expression of something deeper-rooted. He’s by far the best reason for watching the film even though his superior acting also marks him out and, in effect, magnifies the sense you get of Colin’s specialness. (As the governor, Michael Redgrave manages to nuance somewhat a cartoon figure; as his colleague, Alec McCowen doesn’t.) The arty bleakness of the beach at Skegness and the wintry trees in the countryside around Ruxton Towers (photographed by Walter Lassally) are par for the course in a politically serious British film of the early 1960s. Some of the best sequences in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner are ones in which we watch Colin Smith simply running on his own, enjoying both being solitary and the relative freedom of training outside the borstal precincts – as the governor, determined that one of his boys will win the race against the public school, has allowed Colin to do.
There’s a nice balance in the alternation between Tom Courtenay’s running naturalistically and in a manner designed to express Colin’s feelings but the final race, and especially its climax, are badly constructed and staged. James Fox, as Gunthorpe, the best athlete in the Ranley team, runs in an exaggeratedly uncoordinated way that wouldn’t allow him to compete successfully at any level. When Colin passes Gunthorpe at what seems to be a still early stage of the race, both Fox and Courtenay are lunging as if for the finishing tape. The watching crowd is too excited too soon, especially as there are other athletic events going on at the same time as the five-mile run. When Colin slows to a halt, he looks exhausted – as if to keep you in suspense as to what’s causing him to give up. This makes no sense once he’s had the revelatory flashback. And the very idea of a contest between Ruxton Towers and Ranley is questionable: you can accept the public school might, for PR reasons, condescend to compete against the borstal but, when the governor tells the headmaster that he likes ‘the idea of winning that trophy off you’, it suggests that the competition is an established event.
The flashbacks to Colin’s life prior to borstal are good enough in terms of social detail. He bitterly resents how his dying father (Peter Madden) was treated by the firm for which he worked many years as a labourer. Colin is no less angry that his mother (Avis Bunnage, who’s too energetic in the role) is carrying on with her ‘fancy man’ (Joe Robinson) even before the father has died. This confusion of Colin’s political and personal anger works well as a trigger for the bakery robbery: Colin has just had a falling out with his mother and is desperate for cash as a result. But the script and especially the direction repeatedly make things either obvious or baffling. Mrs Smith gets insurance money from her late husband’s firm and immediately splashes out on a fur coat, a three-piece suite and a television: you cringe when the family first turn the television on, anticipating the moment when it will break down, as it duly does.
Tony Richardson also spoils the end of the Skegness episode. You’ve already got the point that Colin, Mike and their girls, sitting glumly in a cafe, are depressed that the trip’s over and they have to go back to Nottingham. Richardson, to underline the point, focuses emphatically on the debris of a full ashtray and messy crockery on the cafe table. (James Bolam is good as Mike – not least in suggesting his lack of ambition for better – but the girls aren’t so effective. Topsy Jane looks right as Audrey but she’s a limited actress. Julia Foster is vivid in the smaller role of Gladys but seems frustrated that she’s got so little to do – she’s straining to make an impression.) Colin and Mike sit on Mrs Smith’s new settee, deriding the pompous platitudes of a quintessential Tory politician (Robert Percival) on television. Tom Courtenay and James Bolam make this amusing but here too Richardson’s satirical touch is heavy-handed. After the political broadcast is interrupted for the row between Colin and his mother, the volume on the television is turned back up for us to hear the punchline: the never-had-it-so-good politician proclaims ‘a new Elizabethan age’.
The aftermath to the robbery, in which Colin and Mike steal a cashbox containing seventy pounds, is unconvincing. It isn’t plausible that Colin (as opposed to Mike) would be so daft as to hide the notes in a drainpipe (heavy rain flushes them out) or the cashbox in the soil under a potted plant of his mother’s. Nor is it clear why the police either focus their inquiries immediately on Colin (he can’t be that notorious a lawbreaker if he’s not been in a reformatory before) or don’t take his fingerprints (which must be all over the office from which the cashbox was taken). One of the film’s worst features is the music, composed and arranged by John Addison. Images of life in the borstal are persistently accompanied by ‘Jerusalem’ on the soundtrack: even without the words, the juxtaposition is crudely ironic. When the assembled boys actually sing ‘Jerusalem’, all do so enthusiastically and as if they positively subscribe to Blake’s words: here and elsewhere, Tony Richardson elides the difference between being, for good reason, fed up with your circumstances and being thoughtful about how to change them through political action. For the robbery episode, John Addison has written quasi-comical music: it’s strongly reminiscent of the accompaniment, also by Addison, to the youngsters expressing themselves in Richardson’s previous film, A Taste of Honey. In the sociopolitical context of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, this larky music is offensively patronising.
27 October 2014