The Angry Young Man is Tired: Albert Finney and 1960s British Cinema

This chapter focuses on Albert Finney as a distinctive British actor whose evolving star image, during the first ten years of his
career, reveals useful historical and cultural insights into British cinema and culture of the 1960s. Discussion of Finney begins
with the ground-breaking film, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), in which his iconic status as a 'working-class hero' is
established, and traces the various ways it is subsequently developed, subverted and finally deconstructed through five key
films of the decade. The chapter draws on original archival research of contemporary media coverage and contextualises these
within some of the dominant debates about masculinity of the period. The chapter is included in an anthology comprising a
number of revisionist studies of key British film stars, a field of British cinema history which had previously been somewhat
neglected by rigorous, academic work and, as such, constitutes a significant contribution to the field.