The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is a 1962 British coming-of-age film directed by Tony Richardson, one of the new young directors emerging from the English Stage Company at the Royal Court. The screenplay was written by Alan Sillitoe, based on his 1959 short story of the same title, and concerns a rebellious youth who has been sentenced to a borstal for burgling a bakery. He gains privileges in the institution through his prowess as a long-distance runner, but reveries of important events before his incarceration that he has during his solitary runs lead him to re-evaluate his status as the prize athlete of the Governor.
The film opens with Colin Smith running, alone, along a bleak country road somewhere in rural England. In a brief voiceover, he says that running is the way his family has always coped with the world's troubles, but that, in the end, the runner is always alone and cut off from spectators, left to deal with life on his own.
Colin is then shown with a group of other young men, all handcuffed. They are being taken to a borstal (a detention centre for juvenile offenders) named Ruxton Towers, where the inmates live in a series of Nissen huts with no privacy. The institution is overseen by the Governor, who believes that the hard work and discipline imposed on his charges will ultimately make them useful members of society. Sullen and rebellious, Colin immediately catches the Governor's eye as a test of his beliefs.
An important part of the Governor's rehabilitation programme is athletics, and he soon notices that Colin is a talented runner, easily able to outrun Ruxton's reigning long-distance runner. The Governor is especially keen on Colin's abilities because, for the first time, his charges have been invited to compete in a five-mile cross-country run against Ranley, a nearby public school with privileged pupils from upper-class families, and he sees the invitation as an important way to demonstrate the success of his rehabilitation programme.
A former runner himself, the Governor takes Colin under his wing, promoting him from dismantling scrap to performing light gardening work, and eventually giving him the freedom to do solo practice runs outside Ruxton's barbed-wire fences. On these runs, Colin reflects on his life before he was incarcerated. His family lived a difficult, poverty-stricken life in a prefab in a lower-class district of industrial Nottingham. The jobless Colin indulged in petty crime with his best friend, Mike, while, at home, his father's long years of toil in a local factory resulted in a terminal illness.
When Colin's father refused treatment and died, Colin was left as the family's breadwinner, but he flatly refused a job offered to him at the factory where his father worked. The company paid out a paltry £500 in insurance money, and Colin watched with disdain as his mother quickly spent it all on extravagances. Colin symbolically burned some of his portion of the insurance money and used the rest to treat Mike and two girls they met to an outing in Skegness, where Colin confessed to his date, Audrey, that she was the first woman he ever had sex with.
Colin got in an argument with his mother's lover about who was the man of the house, and his mother told him to leave until he could bring home some money. He and Mike took to the streets, and they spotted an open window at the back of a bakery. They climbed in and stole the cashbox, which contained about £70 (equivalent to £1,900in 2023). Mike wanted to take another trip to Skegness with the girls, but Colin was more cautious and hid the money in a drainpipe outside his house. A surly detective soon showed up and accused Colin of the robbery, but he told the man that he did not know anything about it. The detective later searched the house, but found nothing. Finally, frustrated and angry, the detective returned on a rainy day to say he would be watching Colin, and, as the two stood at the front door, the torrent of rainwater pouring down the drainpipe dislodged the money, which washed out around Colin's feet.
At Ruxton Towers, Colin must contend with his fellow inmates' envying him the favouritism shown to him by the Governor, and he does not like being perceived as "the Governor's blue-eyed boy". He is especially troubled when Mike is sent to Ruxton Towers for stealing a car and, surprised by Colin's status, asks him whose side he is on.
The day of the race against Ranley arrives, with Colin and Gunthorpe, Ranley's star runner, seen as the favourites. Colin eventually overtakes Gunthorpe and gains a comfortable lead, but, as he nears the finish line, the imagery that has been flashing through his mind becomes progressively jarring. He remembers his mother's neglect; his father's dead body; the taunts of his fellow inmates; stern lectures from the detective, the Governor, and Audrey. Just yards from the finish line, Colin stops, unmoved by the calls and protests of the Ruxton Towers crowd. He smiles defiantly at the Governor as Gunthorpe passes him and crosses the finish line to victory. Disappointed, the Governor walks away.
Some time later, Colin is back dismantling scrap, now ignored by the Governor.
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 74% based on 23 reviews, with an average score of 7.6/10;[3] the site's "critics consensus" reads: "Dry and full of angst, this British New Wave classic features potent social commentary and a star making performance by Tom Courtenay as a textbook example of the 'angry young man.'"[3]
In a 2018 Time Out magazine poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers, and critics, the film was ranked as the 36th-best British film ever made.[4]
Awards and nominations
Most Promising New Actor (won) – BAFTA (Tom Courtenay)[5]
Alan Sillitoe was part of the group of writers labeled the "angry young men", who produced media depicting the plight of rebellious youth. The film depicts Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s as an elitist society in which upper-class people enjoy many privileges, while lower-class people suffer a bleak life, and portrays the borstal system of delinquent youth detention centres as a way of keeping working-class people in their "place". The characters are entrenched in their social context, and class consciousness abounds throughout. The "them" and "us" notions that Richardson stresses reflect the basis of British society at the time, and Redgrave's "proper gentleman" of a Governor is in stark contrast to many of the young working-class inmates.
Sillitoe's screenplay can be interpreted as either tragic or bathetic by ultimately projecting the protagonist as a working class rebel, rather than an otherwise rehabilitated, but conformist talent. During the period when Sillitoe wrote the book and screenplay, the sport of running was changing.[6] The purity of running was taken away when Smith entered the race for his own and his institution's benefit, becoming a commodity useful for his patrons' own promotion.[7][6] Sillitoe rejects the commoditisation of running in his book and screenplay, believing instead that a professional becomes commercialised and loses the clarity of thought that comes with running otherwise,[8] which is why Smith chooses to forfeit the race. Literary critic Helen Small stated that "the weight of literary attention seems to be focused on a 'pre-professional era' – either written at that time or looking back at it for inspiration",[6] her research stressing that Sillitoe was an author who believed in the unadulterated sport.
Running is also used as a metaphor to give Smith the ability to escape from the reality of his class level in society.[7] The use of this sport gives Smith the ability to escape from his life as a member of the working-class poor. Sillitoe used running to give his character a chance to reflect upon his social status, and also to escape from the reality that the poor in Britain are faced with.[7]Long-distance running gives the character an ability to freely escape from society without the pressures of a team, which may be found in other athletic stories.[7]
John Edward Thaw, was an English actor in television, stage and cinema, best known for his starring roles in the television series Inspector Morse as Detective Chief Inspector Endeavour Morse and in The Sweeney as Detective Inspector Jack Regan.
Cecil Antonio Richardson was an English theatre and film director, producer and screenwriter, whose career spanned five decades. He was identified with the "angry young men" group of British directors and playwrights during the 1950s, and was later a key figure in the British New Wave filmmaking movement.
Sir Thomas Daniel Courtenay is an English actor. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he achieved prominence in the 1960s as part of actors of the British New Wave. Courtenay has received numerous accolades including three BAFTA Awards, a Golden Globe Award, the Silver Bear, and the Volpi Cup for Best Actor as well as nominations for two Academy Awards, two Tony Awards, and a Emmy Award. He was knighted for his services to cinema and theatre in the 2001 New Year Honours.
Alan Sillitoe FRSL was an English writer and one of the so-called "angry young men" of the 1950s. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied. He is best known for his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and his early short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", both of which were adapted into films.
A borstal was a type of youth detention centre in the United Kingdom, several member states of the Commonwealth and the Republic of Ireland. In India, such a detention centre is known as a borstal school.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is the first novel by British author Alan Sillitoe and won the Author's Club First Novel Award.
Scum is a 1979 British prison drama film directed by Alan Clarke and starring Ray Winstone, Mick Ford, Julian Firth and John Blundell. The film portrays the brutality of life inside a British borstal. The script was originally filmed as a television play for the BBC's Play for Today series in 1977. However, owing to the violence depicted, it was withdrawn from broadcast. Two years later, director Alan Clarke and scriptwriter Roy Minton remade it as a film, first shown on Channel 4 in 1983. By this time the borstal system had been reformed. The original TV version was eventually allowed to be aired eight years later in 1991.
King Rat is a 1965 American war film written and directed by Bryan Forbes and starring George Segal and James Fox. They play Corporal King and Flight Lieutenant Marlowe, respectively, two World War II prisoners of war in a squalid camp in Singapore. Among the supporting cast are John Mills and Tom Courtenay. The film was adapted from James Clavell's novel King Rat (1962), which in turn is partly based on Clavell's experiences as a POW at Changi Prison in Singapore in the latter part of the Second World War.
"The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" is a short story by Alan Sillitoe, published in 1959 as part of a short story collection of the same title. The work focuses on Smith, a poor Nottingham teenager from a dismal home in a working class area, who has bleak prospects in life and few interests beyond petty crime. The boy experiences social alienation and turns to long-distance running as a method of both emotional and physical escape from his situation. The story was adapted for a 1962 film of the same title.
The Fallen Idol is a 1948 British mystery thriller film directed by Carol Reed, and starring Ralph Richardson, Bobby Henrey, Michèle Morgan, and Denis O'Dea. Its plot follows the young son of a diplomat in London, who comes to suspect that his family's butler, whom he idolises, has committed a murder. It is based on the 1936 short story "The Basement Room", by Graham Greene.
The British New Wave is a style of films released in Great Britain between 1959 and 1963. The label is a translation of Nouvelle Vague, the French term first applied to the films of François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard among others.
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Lifeguard is a 1976 American drama film made by Paramount Pictures. It was directed by Daniel Petrie from a screenplay by Ron Koslow. It stars Sam Elliott, Anne Archer, Stephen Young, Parker Stevenson, and Kathleen Quinlan. The film follows Rick Carlson, a Southern California lifeguard who is prompted to reexamine his life when he attends his high school reunion.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a 1960 British kitchen sink drama film directed by Karel Reisz and produced by Tony Richardson. It is an adaptation of the 1958 novel by Alan Sillitoe, with Sillitoe himself writing the screenplay. The plot concerns a young teddy boy machinist, Arthur, who spends his weekends drinking and partying, all the while having an affair with a married woman.
In Bruges is a 2008 black comedy-drama crime thriller film directed and written by Martin McDonagh in his feature-length debut. It stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as two London-based Irish hitmen hiding in Bruges, with Ralph Fiennes as their boss. The film is set and was filmed in Bruges, Belgium.
Scum is a 1977 British television play written by Roy Minton and directed by Alan Clarke. It was intended to be screened as part of the Play for Today series. Instead the production was banned by the BBC after it was completed in 1977 and not aired until BBC 2 showed it on 27 July 1991. In the interim, a theatrical film version was released in 1979. The original version features Ray Winstone, John Blundell, David Threlfall, Martin Phillips, Phil Daniels and Davidson Knight.
Gambit is a 2012 heist comedy film directed by Michael Hoffman from a screenplay by Joel and Ethan Coen, starring Colin Firth, Cameron Diaz, Alan Rickman, Tom Courtenay and Stanley Tucci. It is a remake of the 1966 film of the same name starring Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner is a short story collection by English author Alan Sillitoe.
Key to the Door is a novel by English author Alan Sillitoe, first published in 1961.
"The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" is a 1959 short story by Alan Sillitoe.
↑ Calhoun, Dave; Huddleston, Tom; Jenkins, David; Adams, Derek; Andrew, Geoff; Davies, Adam Lee; Fairclough, Paul; Hammond, Wally (10 September 2018). "The 100 best British films". Time Out London. Time Out Group. Retrieved 16 September 2018.
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