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Look Back in Anger

1959

Drama

Plot summary


Uploaded by: FREEMAN

Top cast

Nigel Davenport Photo
Nigel Davenport as 1st. Commercial Traveller
Claire Bloom Photo
Claire Bloom as Helena Charles
Richard Burton Photo
Richard Burton as Jimmy Porter
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
823.81 MB
1204*720
English 2.0
NR
23.976 fps
1 hr 38 min
P/S 1 / 2
1.57 GB
1792*1072
English 2.0
NR
23.976 fps
1 hr 38 min
P/S ...

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by MartinHafer4 / 10

Painful to watch and incredibly unpleasant

Technically speaking, "Look Back in Anger" is a well made film. Despite that, it's also an incredibly unpleasant picture...so unpleasant that I wonder how many people can actually see the entire movie.

Richard Burton plays a completely unlikable jerk. Despite having a college degree, he works a low-paying working class job and would do nothing else. This is because he is seething with contempt for the upper classes and would much rather be poor and angry than anything else. This is a super-serious problem considering he's married to an upper-class girl. And, he makes it his life's work to destroy her and make her feel completely devalued. Boht of these folks are friends with a guy who likes them both...which seems very tough considering he sees his friend mistreating his other friend all the time.

If you can stand Burton's very famous film, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", then you MIGHT be able to appreciate and enjoy "Look Back in Anger". As for me, like is just too short to spend this much time watching someone emotionally (and occasionally physically) torture another human being. Very unpleasant.

Reviewed by Leofwine_draca5 / 10

First of the kitchen sink genre of film-making

LOOK BACK IN ANGER has the distinction of being one of the first kitchen sink dramas that would become all the rage in the early 1960s. It's an adaptation of the famous John Osborne play about an angry young man and the love triangle in which he finds himself involving his wife and her best friend. I was surprised to see that Nigel Kneale adapted the story for the screen as this is well away from his comfort zone of science fiction and weirdness.

The film features a typically bullish performance from Richard Burton as the protagonist who spends the entire running time bullying the women in his life (apart from his mother, as he loves her). Yes, the film is in essence a couple of of hours of Burton abusing people, so I didn't find it particularly entertaining. The characters are certainly well drawn with plenty of depth and more than realistic, but as a slice-of-life story nothing much really happens during the running time (there are no character arcs or anything like that) and I was left feeling depressed about what I'd just watched more than anything else.

Reviewed by BrentCarleton5 / 10

Blame the bloody Edwardians!

"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.

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