Class and the British New Wave - Why Smith should have crossed the finish line
At the end of Tony Richardson’s landmark film of the British New Wave, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), the protagonist Colin Smith (Tom Delaney) is faced with a choice. Locked up in borstal for a burglary offence, he has spent the majority of his sentence winning the respect of the prison staff and governor after they discover his athletic abilities, which they hope will be enough to win the prison a trophy in an upcoming cross country running competition being held against the attendees of a nearby private school. On the day of the race and after leaving the nearest competitor trailing in his wake, Smith approaches the cheering crowds standing near the end, but hesitates just before crossing the finishing line, deliberately allowing his competitor from the public school to overtake and secure victory rather than succumbing to the wishes of the governor and winning the cup.
The final scene which follows this shows Smith working sulkily in the prison workshop with his fellow inmates and having orders barked at him by an angry guard, the status and respect once accorded to him by the prison authorities because of his potential as an athlete now reduced to nothing because of this defiant act of self-sabotage. Smith is now forced to carry out menial labour stripping old gas masks for scrap with his fellow inmates – no longer seen as a promising hope for the future but back where he belongs amongst the toiling and impoverished masses.
When the British New Wave was spawned out of the Free Cinema movement of the 1950s, which produced documentaries depicting the lives of ordinary working class people of this era, Richardson along with directors such as Karl Reisz and Lindsay Anderson attempted to carry over this documentary-like realism into narrative cinema. Several novels, short stories and plays by working class writers like Alan Sillitoe and John Osbourne that captured the rebellious spirit of young people in this post-war period were adapted into films depicting a constant struggle with authority figures, the establishment and attempts to rebel against the confining nature of their class, often through hedonistic and rebellious behaviour.
This was done in a way that emphasised the “real” – meaning that films were shot on location in the places where they were set as much as possible, with minimal budgets and actors who, although often were trained professionally, came from modest backgrounds themselves. The result is a cluster of films of generally high quality that capture a snapshot of life for ordinary people coming to the end of the privation and restrictiveness of the war years and discovering ways of fighting back against the old system and its values. They offer a glimpse of a Britain whose people are trying to come to terms with their status as citizens of a superpower in decline.
Unsurprisingly the British New Wave was broadly sympathetic to the working class and approached its subject matter with a distinctly leftist tint. In The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, the protagonist Smith is born into an environment presenting little prospects and no hope of breaking away from the boundaries set by his class – his late father passes away from medical complications related to his factory work for which he is not compensated and his mother is left with two of Smith’s young siblings to support and provide for. After declining a job at his father’s old factory Smith indulges in petty thievery with his friend Mike (James Bolam) which leads to his imprisonment. His anti-authoritarian streak is boasted about from the first moments of his incarceration: “Do you know what I'd do if I had the whip hand? I'd get all the coppers, governors, posh whores, army officers and members of parliament and I'd stick them up against this wall and let them have it, 'cause that's what they'd like to do to blokes like us.”
Whilst the directors of the British New Wave had the neglected and downtrodden factory workers and manual labourers of the 1950s in mind when making their films, wanting to portray them as victims of an unfair and decaying system, the majority were privately educated bohemians with little knowledge or experience of the hardships endured by the characters they portrayed. Their work therefore tended to overly romanticise the subject matter and, whilst purporting to create films seeking to paint the working class in a positive and heroic light, sometimes ended up inadvertently doing the opposite.
Which brings me to a question I’ve wrestled with since first viewing the film and reading the excellent short story by Alan Sillitoe which it is based. Would it have been a more satisfying, not to say socially just and empowering ending, if Smith had cast aside his resentment, shown the competitors from the private school born into privileged backgrounds he was just as capable as they were by winning the race and crossing the finish line? Perhaps at the last minute after creating the illusion that he had the power not to conform if he wanted to but was choosing to comply in order to win the victory he deserved for both himself and his class?
To start with this would have even added greater poignancy and impact to the final scene depicting Smith toiling away in the workshop because it would have highlighted that, even being compliant with the wishes of the prison authorities by winning the race was not enough to guarantee deliverance from the life of conformity he is destined for as a result of his birth into a lower social class outside of the establishment.
Although the original ending intended to allow Smith the belief he has committed an outlandish act of rebellion against the authorities, so he can go back to his life of destitution and petty criminality feeling as if he has got one over on the system which has subjugated him, there is no escaping the fact that the only person benefiting directly from the situation is the competitor from the private school, who is sure to gloat and feel vindicated in the belief of his superiority and that of the class he represents, which is cemented by his victory over Smith, as well as those in society who generally feel that people like him are always destined for failure regardless of the talent or aspiration they harbour. Rather than venerating Smith and his class, it is in many ways an ending that favours a view of the working class that is closed minded and cynical.
Throughout the film Smith is seen battling with the forces of authority and the establishment responsible for oppressing his class. He is at first resentful of the benign approach taken by the prison authorities which aims to reform Smith and his fellow inmates by attempting to turn them into law abiding citizens. The governor even allows Smith to carry out long distance training runs without supervision of a guard. He has the opportunity to abscond should he wish but chooses not to, justifying his apparent compliance as a ruse to fool the authorities into thinking they are successfully reforming him: “I’m nobody’s favourite….I’m gonna let ‘em think they’ve got me house trained, but they’ll never get me the bastards. To get me beat, they’ll have to stick a rope round me neck. That’s a job they don’t mind doing.”
Perhaps Smith sees the establishment represented by the prison authorities as exploiting his athletic abilities for their own benefit, as he is exploited by them in wider society on the outside, and this is behind his refusal to cross the finish line. This is hinted at as Smith mulls over the challenges he has experienced in his life which Richardson presents via flashback just before the race is over. This would certainly chime with Sillitoe’s original short story which the following passage seems to allude:
“And all of this is another upper cut I’m getting in first at people like the governor, to show how – if I can – his races are never won even though some bloke always comes in unknowingly in first, how in the end the governor is going to be doomed while blokes like me will take the pickings from his roasted bones and dance like maniacs amongst his borstal’s ruins.”
It is unfair to attribute the ending solely to the upper class naivety of Richardson when he is using Sillitoe’s short story as subject matter. Born into the slums of Nottingham in the mid 1920s, the writer produced a large body of work focussing on characters like Smith, born into a set of circumstances which would have bred a desire to rebel and fight back against the system. Sillitoe’s ending shows Smith seemingly making a powerful statement, as it would have been clear to all spectators he would have finished the race with ease should he have wished to do so. This would have allowed Smith a victory of sorts to be content with, even if this meant forgoing any future privileges or benefits that would have came his way had he crossed the finishing line legitimately.
But we are still left feeling as if Smith has undersold himself in his reckless mission to defy his masters. By throwing away his chance of victory, he also abandons any possibility of redemption and true liberation from the poverty of his surroundings. He has instead presented the establishment represented by the prison governors and private school pupils a victory of their own and cemented their arrogant belief in their own superiority over the working class, perceived as being destined to remain inferior and in their rightful place, too petty, resentful and unresourceful to properly do anything about it.
Despite this the films of the British New Wave, including others by Tony Richardson, deserve to be watched for the undeniable role they play as part of Britain’s cinematic heritage. They have largely aged well not only for their aesthetic importance – helping to give birth to the “kitchen sink” social realism - but also because they explore and present realities concerning the injustices of the country’s class system, which tragically remain in tact some sixty years after their release. Social mobility remains generally poor in the UK. Several studies have shown those born into working class households are likely to remain there for life and face difficulties in climbing up the income ladder. The dominance of people educated privately working in some of the country’s top positions in culture, media and politics is well documented. People who are working class report feeling increasingly discriminated against in a country that still feels run by an out of touch elite that is profoundly unmeritocratic. These realities alone make the films of the British New Wave worth re-visiting and savouring, for the potential to discover new meanings and interpretations concerning why class has remained so engrained within our society and how we can start changing things for the better.