Most of us don't associate cinema's New Wave of the 1950s and '60s with British filmmakers. It's not that they weren't French, but that they were, well, British. Karel Reisz must have had this in mind when he and his peers inaugurated the so-called Free Cinema movement of the late '50s, supplanting starchy Queen's English moviemaking with raffish, working-class work designed to touch a nerve. Without Reisz, the term "English social realism" might still sound a little oxymoronic, or at least like the setup for a wry joke.
Reisz, who died in London last week at the age of 76, had an outsider's insight, and a relatively standard New Wave career path -- evading dangerous uncertainty and meandering between opportunities until his passion for cinema finally demanded a commitment, then getting down to business and becoming a consummate professional.
He was born in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, and when he was 12, the Nazi threat prompted his father, a Jewish lawyer, to send him to the U.K. Both of Reisz's parents later died at Auschwitz. He picked up the language, went to a Quaker school, served as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, and studied chemistry at Oxford, where he co-founded Sequence, the Oxford Film Society magazine, with Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson. (He later wrote for Sight and Sound.)
Reisz became the first program director of Britain's National Film Theatre in 1952, and four years later developed the Free Cinema film series there, featuring, among other fare, freshly gritty documentary shorts made by him,
Anderson, and Richardson about England's version of kids who weren't yet called "at-risk youth" (that's how disenfranchised they were). The series became very popular very quickly, and effectively shelved Reisz's safe career as a London schoolteacher.
His first feature, in 1960, was Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a brash, vernacular adaptation about the bleak but worthy life of a factory worker, played with impressive force by Albert Finney in his first starring role. The film gave cinematic expression to the "angry young man" ethos then prevalent in British theatre, and won critical notice immediately. Reisz had done more than touched a nerve. He had opened a vein.
Though he would direct only 11 features in 30 years, Reisz's influence was and is pervasive, perhaps because of his multifaceted, even contradictory, craftiness. He figured out an important trick for a cinema artist, not to mention a respectable Englishman: How to be heady and grounded at once, without being disingenuous. His commitment to social realism and directness of cinematic expression never seemed incongruous with an interest in semi-stylized biopics and thoroughly postmodern literary adaptations. Reisz was brave enough to make a film about Patsy Cline's sad life story, with 1985's Sweet Dreams, and maybe braver to cast Jessica Lange. The French Lieutenant's Woman, in 1981, was his most popular and most fully realized work, and, as a period piece that oscillates between modern and Victorian views of the world, a long and liberated step from the manifesto mandates of Free Cinema.
But Reisz made it work. He was an actor's director as well as a superb technician; his 1953 book, The Technique of Film Editing, rightly still enjoys wide esteem from both academics and professional colleagues. His skill for the cultivation of fine performances -- from Finney in Saturday Night... and Night Must Fall (1964) to Vanessa Redgrave in Isadora (1968) to James Caan in The Gambler (1974) to Lange to Meryl Streep -- still seems downright preternatural.
"A good director is always partly a novelist," John Fowles wrote, in an essay introducing the published screenplay of The French Lieutenant's Woman. That's not slander, at least not from a stylist like Fowles. In the same essay, he observed, "To assemble a book with a considerable and deliberate number of elements you know cannot be filmed, and then to disassemble and reconstruct it out of the elements that can, is surely an occupation best left to masochists or narcissists." With gratitude, Fowles left the formidable task of adaptation to Harold Pinter and Reisz, his first choices for screenwriter and director.
Really, who else could marry the traditions of Pinter and Fowles, or could realize the ambition to make a work that was at once polished and seething and graciously self-conscious? Reisz's adoptive Britishness was in some ways a necessary synthesis of styles, and his legacy is the advancement of moviemaking all over the world.
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