Momma Don't Allow
Free Cinema (eleven films) • 21m
Directed by Karel Reisz & Tony Richardson • Documentary • With Chris Barber, Monty Sunshine, Pat Halcox, Ron Bowden • 1956 • 22 minutes
This lively Free Cinema short captures a night out at the Wood Green Jazz Club, where teenagers jive to trad jazz. Funded by the BFI Experimental Film Fund, it was filmed over the course of nine Saturdays by Karel Reisz, then programmer of the National Film Theatre, and a young BBC television director called Tony Richardson. Both were key protagonists in the development of the Free Cinema documentary movement and then, as feature film directors, the British New Wave. Free Cinema films shared a low-budget, naturalistic aesthetic thanks to handheld cameras and non-synchronised sound – usually without narration – and a focus on ordinary, often working-class subjects. Momma Don’t Allow exudes warmth and is sympathetic to its working-class characters, contrasting the relaxed, confident working-class ‘Teddy Boys’ and their girlfriends with the more awkward ‘toffs’, whose arrival threatens to change the mood of the evening.
Up Next in Free Cinema (eleven films)
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Refuge England
Directed by Robert Vas • Documentary • 1959 • 27 minutes
Director Robert Vas was himself a refugee from Hungary, having arrived in London only three years earlier when he received a grant from the BFI to make the film. Despite its slightly incongruous use of voiceover, the film was adopted by th...
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The Vanishing Street
Directed by Robert Vas • Documentary • 1962 • 20 minutes
This classic documentary by Robert Vas depicts the way of life in an east London Jewish community on Hessel Street, Whitechapel. Its back-to-back houses and small shops are about to be replaced by high-rise flats. The thriving community is...
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Every Day Except Christmas
Directed by Lindsay Anderson • Documentary • With Alun Owen • 1957 • 40 minutes
Lindsay Anderson followed his Free Cinema debut O Dreamland with this affectionate tribute to working-class life, depicting the hustle and bustle of Covent Garden market. On the back of his renowned Free Cinema film ...
