While I was watching Saturday Night And Sunday Morning on Mubi, I came to realise that there would probably be rather a lot of people from nations other than the UK watching this film and attempting to understand what the hell people were talking about here. Which amuses me greatly, especially as they didn't provide subtitles.

So, for those of you from outside this country struggling with some of the terminology in this film or about to watch it for the first time, here's a short glossary of some of the terms you will hear more than once in this film:-

* bleeder: A person of ill-repute - "Some bleeder in Wal-Mart stood on my foot!"

* summat: Another way…

A few weeks in the life of Arthur Seaton, a Nottingham factory worker played by Albert Finney who fancies a pint, a fag, and a tumble; who's even more pathetic than the townsfolk he loathes; who's a terminally selfish and self-destructive asshole. Here are three incidents from late in the film:

1) Arthur foolishly climbs onto a carnival ride alongside the married woman (Rachel Roberts) with whom he's been sleeping. Two soldiers in league with her mild-mannered husband are standing on the outer perimeter of the ride as it goes 'round and around, waiting for Arthur to hop off. The camera catches Arthur and Brenda in a series of tight two shots on the ride itself, with light and shadow…

Albert Finney is on fire in this 1960 entry of the "Kitchen Sink/British New Wave. Based on Alan Sillitoe's excellent novel of the same name, Finney plays Arthur Seaton, a young lad working as a machinist who loves nothing better than drinking, smoking, and fucking. He's having an affair with a co-worker's wife (Rachel Roberts) when he meets Doreen (Shirley Anne Field). He juggles both of them for a while but it isn't long before one of them in pregnant and he finds himself having to make some grown-up decisions.

Finney is extraordinary in this. Honestly, I feel like he's severely unappreciated as an actor. He's had a fantastic career with memorable roles spanning 50 years. I'll plug one of…

Whilst Woodfall’s previous efforts Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer could lay claim to creating the genre we came to know as kitchen sink, it perhaps wasn’t until Saturday Night and Sunday Morning that this style of social realism really came into its own, thanks to its star, Albert Finney. Simply put, unlike Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier (the stars of those earlier Woodfall films) the Salford born Finney was unmistakably the real deal. Before Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the working classes were neither seen or represented in mainstream British cinema. The closest we had was perhaps John Mills or Richard Attenborough, dropping their aitches and stiffening their upper lips as heroic tommies or jolly jack tars in…

This is a slice of life film to the extreme. It's a coming of age story but one that kind of avoids the maturation element. It's very engaging moment to moment. It feels real and lived in. You get the sense that you are witnessing real lives unfold. But it makes it entertaining. The lead character is pretty much a loutish jerk. The film is pointedly without climax. It ends on a note of resigned progress I would say. There's something really wonderful about that. It's just life, nothing more or less.

This is the kind of film that would be necessary to invent if it didn't exist. I would say a film like Ladybird is cut from the same…

Whilst Woodfall’s previous efforts Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer could lay claim to creating the genre we came to know as kitchen sink, it perhaps wasn’t until Saturday Night and Sunday Morning that this style of social realism really came into its own, thanks to its star, Albert Finney. Simply put, unlike Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier (the stars of those earlier Woodfall films) the Salford born Finney was unmistakably the real deal. Before Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the working classes were neither seen or represented in mainstream British cinema. The closest we had was perhaps John Mills or Richard Attenborough, dropping their aitches and stiffening their upper lips as heroic tommies or jolly jack tars in…

Albert Finney’s star-making role was as cheeky chappie Arthur, a bad-sort factory worker who finds himself in conflict with his world at almost every turn. Unlike Burton’s character in Look Back in Anger, Finney is never particularly aware of the reason for his situation, or if he is, not in any serious way. He is a product of his environment but it seems he rather enjoys this fact, dating two women at once (one married) without any overbearing moral concerns beyond his own person.

Perhaps the film’s most curious angle is where it supposes all this wrongdoing will lead. No great drama, but normality – Arthur will lay down his boisterous ways, if only a touch, and settle down. He…

As my uni classmates will know all too well, I take issue with middle-class filmmakers and their approximations of working-class life, which inevitably come across as reductive and fetishistic.

That said however, I do appreciate the Free Cinema and texts such as this and A Taste of Honey for reminding those bloody southerners that there is life outside of the M25. I think their enduring legacy has been to harm northern filmmaking overall since audiences have come to expect gritty reality from a northern-based film, but at the time it must have been refreshing to a provincial crowd to see archetypes they could recognise on the big screen.

Setting personal gripes with wider issues aside, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning…