Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner still holds up as a great film

For my gen., the Tony Richardson 1962 b-w British film The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner was the first and maybe the best small-scale, independent, auteurist film we'd ever seen - somehow it played at a few movie theaters in the Oranges (in particular the"art house" Ormont, in EO, can't imagine what's there today) and it opened up for us all kinds of cinematic possibilities: a great, contemporary movie didn't have to be big, bright, in color, w/ major stars and sparkling dialogue. Here was a film dark, understated, heavily accented (this was a few years before the British invasion), about a working-class teenager struggling with family, love, sex, ambition, and most of all the hopelessness of life in post-War England - the post-war prosperity had definitely not reached the streets of Nottingham. Why couldn't there be films like this in the US? Comparing Loneliness w/ the very popular at the time West Side Story showed all that was lacking (or all that was over-abundant) in American movies. It took a few years before we were able to see - mostly in college (we rarely ventured into NYC for movies) the great European and Japanese films, and understood the place Loneliness had in the canon - not necessarily the leading edge, as it turned out, but one of the few exemplars of the auteur tradition made in English, at least up to that time. W/ some trepidation we watched the film last night and I'm pleased that it holds up so well over time: even today, the story line is gripping, the characters indelible, the conflict between the young "delinquent" - a great Tom Courtenay (still acting - see 45 Years), Colin Smith - and the headmaster of the "reform school" who thinks he's truly helping his charges through good, clean exercise and competition and is really serving only his own ego -is as powerful today as ever. Some beautiful scenes and extremely powerful images: the factories of Nottingham seen from hilltops, the escape to the seaside for a weekend, the whimsical but pathetic shopping spree, the tiny TV and the super-annoying advertisements, Colin's run through the woods. Richardson deserves great credit, but so does Alan Sillitoe, who did a great job adapting his own brief novel (long story?) for the screen (most writers screw up adapting their own works); the novel is from the 1950s and we should probably think of the film as set then as well - closer to the poverty of the war years than the film date of 1962.