“Running’s always been a big thing in our family,” Tom Courtenay’s voiceover mutters bleakly as a pale, knock-kneed youth jogs into view against the slate-grey Northern sky. “Especially running away from the police.”        

These are the opening lines of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, one of the last great films in the British New Wave movement, a gritty sixties tale of rebellion and personal pride – and perhaps Sillitoe’s finest short-story-made-screenplay to date. Director Tony Richardson, whose previous kitchen-sink films had included A Taste Of Honey and Look Back In Anger, (and who had lent his production skills to the film adaptation of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) once again captured the futility and depressive backdrop of post-war Britain perfectly as our hero Colin Smith (Courtenay) deals with his stifling family relationships and isolation in the only way people could in them days – by running away. And, as it turns out, Colin’s got quite a knack for it.

The story is told in flashbacks, starting with the athletically gifted Colin in training for a race against a rival borstal with spurts of memory explaining how he came to be in this disciplinary environment. We learn through his icy narrative of his joyless life in industrial Nottingham (every smut and smudge made grotesquely romantic by cinematographer Walter Lassally), of his dying father refusing treatment, of his mother finding a fancyman before her husband has even been laid to rest. We learn of his love for a smart, innocent girl named Audrey (played by Topsy Jane), of his longing to find the money to give her something of a future, of his involvement in a life of theft and petty crime in trying to do so.

After an expedition to rob a bakery leads to his capture and incarceration at Ruxton Towers, Colin establishes himself as a tough, rebellious force against the authority that tries to correct him. He makes no attempt to hide his utter contempt for his peers – on the contrary, a majority of his social interaction consists of sullen glares and sarcastic comments – though most of the narrative is told from within his head, such is his unwillingness to communicate with those around him.

Loneliness… is a daring representation of the feeling of disenchantment arising from the youth of the sixties, and the final message is clear – the bourgeoisie will try and use the working classes, the likes of Colin and his ailing father, for their own personal gain. Colin’s failure to comply with these selfish demands leads to nowhere but further repression, but as his final satisfied sneer reminds us – at least you’ve kept your dignity.