NOTES ON KAREL REISZ
Karel Reisz was a Jewish refugee one of the 669 rescued by Sir Nicholas Winton. He came to England in 1938, speaking almost no English. After attending Leighton Park School he joined the Royal Air Force towards the end of the war; his parents died at Auschwitz. Following his war service, he read Natural Sciences at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and began to write for film journals, including Sight & Sound. Reisz was a founder member of the Free Cinema documentary film movement. His first short film, Momma Don’t Allow (1955), co-directed with Tony Richardson, was included in the first Free Cinema programme shown at the National Film Theatre in February 1956. His film ‘We are the Lambeth Boys’ (1958) was a naturalistic depiction of the members of a South London boys' club, which was unusual in showing the leisure life of working-class teenagers as it was, with skiffle music and cigarettes, cricket, drawing and discussion groups. His first feature film ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ (1960) was based on the social realist novel by Alan Sillitoe, and used many of the same techniques as his earlier documentaries. In particular, scenes filmed at the Raleigh bicycle factory in Nottingham have the look of a documentary, and give the story a vivid sense of verisamilitude.