Saturday Night and the Morning After

Steyn On-line ^ | February 10, 2019 | Mark Steyn

[Twotone]

Albert Finney died on Thursday, apparently from one of those sudden infections generally harmless to youth but swiftly lethal to otherwise healthy old men. His last film was in 2012 - Skyfall, one of the best of all 007 outings, in which he played the Bond family's ancient Scottish retainer at James' crumbling childhood home. In that diamond jubilee year of Cubby Broccoli's lucrative franchise, it was a role fairly obviously intended for Sean Connery, but which Sir Sean, after Never Say Never Again, decided to say never again to, perhaps wisely. Finney was hairy, game, and, in his scenes with M (Judi Dench), not un-tender. And so half a century on screen ended with affectionate reviews for an undemanding turn in a global blockbuster.

Finney became a West End star at 23 in Keith Waterhouse's 1959 stage adaptation of Billy Liar, his novel of a northern working-class fantasist dreaming of life as a comedy writer in the Smoke (London). His second film, based on Alan Sillitoe's book Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, found him in a more naturalistic treatment of the same general milieu - a machinist at a bicycle factory in the East Midlands - and so for a while Finney was grouped with the so-called "angry young men" of gritty kitchen-sink dramas. A scion of Salford Grammar School, he would later concede that his own childhood hadn't, in fact, been quite that "gritty", and he was not by nature that "angry" (quite the opposite in my limited experience), but he kept his working-class vowels through the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and he belonged to the first generation of British actors who didn't aspire to drawl "Anyone for tennis?" as though born to it.

[mowowie]

RIP
Good actor

[Albion Wilde]

bump

[Albion Wilde]

A lovely tribute. I’m inspired to see a couple of the Finney films I’d missed out on over the years. Thank you, Mark Steyn.