A Kind of Loving

Schlesinger's first feature, an adaptation of Stan Barstow's novel directed with a quiet sympathy he subsequently lost (except for Sunday, Bloody Sunday) in pursuing flashy stylistics. The plot has seen sterling service (man trapped into marriage by an unplanned pregnancy), the setting is the then fashionable one of North Country factory and lower-middle-class aspirations, and the dialogue has the sort of terse, tape-recorder saltiness that scriptwriters Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse used to churn out by the mile. Yet with all faults (which include a clumsily episodic structure), it remains keenly observant in detail and rather moving in its very unpretentiousness.