REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT

 A masterpiece and one of the greatest of all movies set in the world of professional boxing even if scenes of actual boxing are conspicuous by their absence. "Requiem for a Heavyweight" also represents one of the great debuts in American cinema. Ralph Nelson was already 46 when he made this and had already more than a decade working on television behind him, where in 1957 he had already directed the original television version of this film.

As the heavyweight of the title Anthony Quinn is magnificent; it is almost certainly his best performance and in any year other than 1962 he would have been nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. He is superbly supported by Jackie Gleason, Mickey Rooney and Julie Harris. Arthur J. Ornitz did the luminous black and white cinematography while as the young fighter who lays Quinn out in the pre-credit sequence Mohammad Ali appears under his original name of Cassius Clay, naturally playing himself.

LOOK BACK IN ANGER

Before George and Martha there were Jimmy and Alison, the vituperate couple at the heart of Osborne's legendary play and I suppose you could say the British Kitchen Sink movement started here. The difference, of course, being that while the Arthur Seatons and Colin Smiths of this world were unequivocally working-class kicking against the system and the intelligentsia, Jimmy and Alison were the intelligentsia playing at being working-class. And therein lies the rub; unlike later 'kitchen sink' movies "Look Back in Anger" isn't so much looking back as mired in the past, an uneasy amalgam of the kind of British films that were coming out in the late fifties and the kind of ground-breaking British cinema that would come to prevail in the early sixties.

There is no denying it is extremely well played. Burton is loudly splendiferous as Jimmy yet he seems strangely miscast at the same time. Perhaps it's that booming, melodious voice; this is a Jimmy that is more Shakespeare than Osborne, (note how Olivier completely subsumed his Shakespearean tendencies to become the definitive Osborne hero in "The Entertainer"). By the time Burton got around to playing George in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" you could say he had grown into the part.

Better cast are Mary Ure as Alison and Claire Bloom as Helena. Their performances feel new and edgy, a move away from the traditional kind of performances that British actresses had been giving up to then while Gary Raymond is an admirable Cliff and a miscast Edith Evans does what she can with Ma Tanner. Tony Richardson opens it out from the Porter's depressing flat to give a more 'cinematic' feel yet it still feels stagey and not in a good way. It's a refreshingly 'grown-up' movie but you may still wonder what all the fuss was about when the original play first opened.