Search - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning on DVD

MPAA Rating: NR Content Advisory: Adult Situations Movie Release: 1961 DVD Release: 02/05/2002 Format: DVD - Black and White,Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV - Closed Captioned Audio Tracks: English Subtitles: English, French, Spanish SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 30 mins Studio: MGM Members Wishing: 2 Genres: Drama, Urban Drama

"All I want is a good time. The rest is propaganda." That's the philosophy of archetypal British "angry young man" Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney). A middle-class working stiff in a dead-end job, Arthur's principal goal in life is to survive the work week, then spend the weekend raising as much hell and drinking as much beer and other liquor as possible. Since pleasure is all that Arthur lives for, he thinks nothing of starting up an affair with the wife (Rachel Roberts) of one of his co-workers (Bryan Pringle). His efforts to secure her an abortion when he gets her pregnant stem not out of concern for her but out of his own selfishness: why should he be tied down with a squalling brat? Despite his carousing and his ongoing desire to escape the dull routine of his weekday existence, Arthur is doomed to perpetuate that routine via his marriage to a complacent "nice" girl (Shirley Ann Field) from his own neighborhood. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Albert Finney - Arthur Seaton
Shirley Ann Field - Doreen Gretton
Rachel Roberts - Brenda
Hylda Baker - Aunt Ada
Norman Rossington - Bert

Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1961) barely made it to laserdisc while that format was viable, but it's gotten to DVD in the early years of the format, courtesy of MGM/UA. Their source is an original British 35 mm fine-grain, which looks sharp enough to step inside of. Letterboxed to an aspect ratio of 1.66:1 (the standard British non-anamorphic widescreen dimension), it's a tightly framed drama that focuses in with laser-like clarity on its subject: frustrated, rebellious factory worker Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney, in a star-making performance). Filmed in industrial Nottingham, the movie is a highly stylized snapshot of working class ferment and discontent, built around Finney's character. The DVD is the best presentation that the movie has likely ever received in America, superior to theatrical prints from the mid-'60s not only in image clarity (you can practically see the pores in people's skin in the close-ups, and all but smell the machinery heating up in the factory scenes), but in its audio track as well; the latter is mastered at a relatively low level but it is clean and it pumps up nicely through speakers, despite being in mono. The 90-minute movie has been given 16 chapters that are well chosen, although, lacking any insert sheet, they're only delineated onscreen through the two-layer menu, which also includes the original trailer and a selection of English captions and Spanish and French subtitles. The menu opens automatically on start-up, with the "play" option in the default position. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide