Movie Review for "The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner"

The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner

The human condition, represented by a single race.

Not enough having one of the best tittles a feature film can have, this remarkable classic from the British New Wave is a rare cinematic miracle: with very little visceral roughness of a little and seemingly trivial plot, it reaches great and bitter truths regarding the human condition. It is life drawn by rough sketches.

This memorable and beautiful portrait of reality has its foreground with the image of a young man simply called Smith (Tom Courtenay), a typical angry young english lad, someone from the common people. He runs alone on a deserted road. Runs without knowing why, runs without knowing where to go. Runs simply because he knows he ought to. Later, in the course of the story, Smith is sent to reform school after a misdemeanor, and there he is required to participate of races among the detainees. Nothing more emblematic.

In the metaphoric race of men, no one is concerned about his own performance. The individual race is the race of the opponent. Those standing behind want to prevent those on the front to continue - hold shirts if necessary; those on the front just want to keep others in their lower position (the film best quotation is: "Keep back, Smith!"). Smith is not one of them, he does not fit into the group. Makes amid race of men his personal race, that same of the first sequence of the movie. He is doomed to live for himself, but bound to win. His fate, in the short term will be the ruin before the other runners. But his real achievement will be well ahead.

On the first dispute, Smith, who comes at first, and then, without any logical justification, takes a tremendous beating from other co-reformatories. The race itself was irrelevant: a simple recreation for young offenders detained. The supervisor, opportunistically, promptly see any way to take advantage of the natural talent of Smith, proposing his participation in official competitions reformatories.

The great merit of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) is the deep significance that it achieves without giving great demonstrations of its intentions. It is a small production, a relatively short film, a portrait of an adult as a young man, but of great significance. An adaptation of Alan Sillitoe short story, it is a film that is in the forefront of British cinema of the early sixties, the so-called British New Wave, an equivalent of the French Nouvelle Vague in England - at a time when "new cinemas" spread worldwide. All the characteristics of this specific style of cinema are there: gray and narrow streets of the English suburbs, the angry young men of the post war thirsty for escape routes from ordinary life, and the kitchen sink drama, inherited from the theater dramaturgy, which is based on the domestic drama, family relationships, represented by the English genre known as the "kitchen sink drama".

The director Tony Richardson, one of the central figures of British culture at the turn of the late 50s to the 60s, whose career also represents the trajectory of this moment of British cinema: came from modern theater, was one of the founders of the Free Cinema, a new documentary film style (the English equivalent of Cinema Verité idealized by Jean Rouch in France, or even the American “Direct Cinema” of D.A. Pennebaker), and, as other directors of avant-gard, went to Hollywood and to the mainstream, winning the Oscar with his very next film, the book adaptation Tom Jones (1963), starred by Albert Finney. The writer Alan Sillitoe, the man behind the short story that gave birth to this film, and himself the author of the adapted screenplay, is also the playwright of the movie which is the highlight of the British New Wave British, the remarkable Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).

The actor who embodies Smith, Tom Courtenay, legend of the English theater, which had its peak of popularity in the popular David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965) as the Russian insurgent Pasha, had a career which has always favored the theater instead of the screens. Recently, after decades with scattered roles, recently returned to the cinema with the encouragement of Dustin Hoffman in Quartet (2012).

Few movies can be simple without simplify reality - perhaps the most ominous attribute that any work of art (or individual) may have. The line is thin, and has extreme results. One of the strongest images that cinema can reproduce is the face of a man. On this film, in its crucial scene, there is a close shot of the Smith’s face, stopped, staring into something, just at the finishing line. There is an enigmatic portrait of a face: the certainty that his victory in a competition of opponents never mean a personal achievement. His great victory is put outside. It means finding his own path.