Look Back in Anger (1985 TV Movie) User Reviews

Great film from a past time TV.

[fsaavedrab · 9/10 · 19 July 2015]

I saw this on TV in the 80's and I have never forgotten it. Having read Osborne's plays at the university, it was a pleasure to watch his best piece portrayed in such a brilliant way and with such great actors. McDowell, of course, excels as Jimmy, but the rest of the ensemble is on par with him. You wonder whatever happened to McDowell's career afterwards, considering the fact he was such a fine actor. One can even forgive him for having been in that horrid thing called Caligula.Too bad it is impossible to find a copy of this made-for-TV movie, considering the time and the fact that maybe there isn't any record of it left. Still, if you can find it among your old VHS tapes, give it a try. I'm sure you will be impressed.

Brilliant Film, McDowell at his Best

[Bacchus-10 · 28 February 2001]

No one's ever heard of this film, and no one will ever visit this page, but this is a film that no longer can be made. The writer, the director, and the star represent a time that is past. John Osborne and Lindsay Anderson are dead, and McDowell, lacking directors of Anderson's and Stanley Kubrick's genius, has never made a film as good since.

The script, taken from Osborne's play, and McDowell's acting are a fountain of champagne.

The story may alienate some people, but the trick is to try to view Jimmy Porter more as a victim than as a victimizer.

Reading your review makes me look back in anger

[dellos · 10/10 · 31 July 2005]

Sir, I have seen this work. it was released on video tape as it was shot on tape and was shown on PBS in the eighties as part of Great Performances Serise. I like this work as anyone who has ever struggled to live and overcome the shoddy treatment of people they love and it is sad because it is all they have. They don't have to make stories like this anymore as too many people are living this way with out hope and in despair as they see no future and tomorrow is the same as today as toady is the same as yesterday. I cried when Alison, Jimmy porters wife comes back to him and tells him about crawling through the mud and finally understanding what grief is like. Some criticism about this version was that McDowell was to old for the part of jimmy, I didn't find it as I was able to suspend disbelief as the acting is very good. I would buy this version of it was on DVD.

Superb dramatis infuriating

[figueroafernando · 10/10 · 27 May 2023]

But who the hell would think of predicting that an utter pessimist like Jimmy would end up living with his wife's best friend and his worst enemy, just to paraphrase her - after being dumped by his wife, the quote from scene 5 of act 1 in Romeo to Juliet; "Jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountains"! If there is anyone who, with such smug and foolish contempt for his wife and his friend Cliff, can radiate such sympathy, it is Jimmy; and don't fool yourself, the viewer, into thinking you have any idea how long an hour can last if it's Sunday when McDowell's character -firing the sardonic nihilism that characterizes him- takes the inevitable weekend jog out of his soul's black hole in the world of the worker; as if all the multiplication of cultural options and offers of modern man and woman, which thanks to him we touch, only returned homo ludens to the penury of the previous century, to the insufferable spleen of Baudelaire, Byron or Rousseau himself in his early years. Young man of the Confessions. But Jimmy can only feel his wife's heart after almost 4 years, not seeing it directly, not knowing it, because all that defensive talkativeness that she gives off repels her and vice versa. That is why when Helena Charles arrives, the opportunity to confess to her about her unexpected pregnancy vanishes with the gale of the new moment. Sort of like, let's digress a bit about Jimmy and Cliff's subsequent shtick, the apartment rocks with derision and suspicion over the echo of T. S Eliot's "Burnt Norton"; Ergo, the dense ennui precedes the "distracted from distraction by distraction" which I personally consider makes the film round. Until Alison returns, childless and with the encouragement and compulsion to feel more and more miserable. Tremendous ending. Masterpiece.