The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is a 1962 British coming-of-age film. The screenplay was written by Alan Sillitoe from his 1959 short story of the same title. The film was directed by Tony Richardson, one of the new young directors emerging from the English Stage Company at the Royal Court. It tells the story of a rebellious youth (played by Tom Courtenay), sentenced to borstal for burgling a bakery, who gains privileges in the institution through his prowess as a long-distance runner. During his solitary runs, reveries of important events, before his incarceration, lead him to re-evaluate his status as the prize athlete of the Governor (Michael Redgrave), eventually undertaking a rebellious act of personal autonomy and suffering an immediate loss of privileges. The film's poster byline reads "you can play it by the rules... or you can play it by ear – WHAT COUNTS IS that you play it right for you...". The film depicts Great Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s as elitist, where upper-class people enjoy many privileges while lower-class people suffer a bleak life, and its Borstal system, of delinquent youth detention centres, as a way of keeping working-class people in their 'place'. Alan Sillitoe was one of the angry young men producing media, vaunting or depicting the plight of rebellious youth. The film has characters entrenched in their social context. Class consciousness abounds throughout: the "them" and "us" notions that Richardson stresses reflect the basis of the British society at the time, so that Redgrave's "proper gentleman" of a Governor is in sharp contrast to many of the young, working-class, inmates. Plot The film opens with Colin Smith running, alone, along a bleak country road somewhere in rural England. In a brief voiceover, Colin tells us that running is the way his family has always coped with the world's troubles, but that in the end, the runner is always alone and cut off from spectators, left to deal with life on his own.