Jimmy Porter (Richard Burton) lives with his demure wife Alison (Mary Ure) and business partner and friend Cliff in a tiny London flat. There is probably no one who can unleash a vicious, rapid-fire verbal attack as well as Richard Burton and that talent is on display here in his fulminations against his wife. A friend of Alison's, Helena, temporarily comes to stay in the already overcrowded space. Alison finally gets enough of the abuse and moves back to live with her wealthy parents and a relationship ensues between Jimmy and Helena. And a pregnancy is thrown in to complicate matters.

It is hard not to compare Jimmy in this melodrama to Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire." They are both brutes and treat their wives abysmally, but they have an animalistic appeal. Brando pulls this off better than Burton does here. It seems that Burton has a hard time reining in his bigger than life personality to play a working class person like Jimmy, who runs a candy stall in a London flea market. I mean, isn't it hard to picture Burton selling chocolates to small children for a living? And he plays his part like he is wanting to reach the folks in the back rows of a theater. All of this is not to say that it isn't a treat to see his performance - he was a great actor.

Trying to figure out the relationships between the four main characters is a task. Jimmy is indeed angry; the source of this anger seems to be that he is an educated man stuck in a dead-end job. Why he takes his anger out so brutally on his wife is hard to understand, and hard to watch. The mismatch in social status between him and his wife is an irritant, but is that enough for him to be so vicious? He is initially insulting to Helena, but that does not deter her from falling for him. On the other hand Jimmy treats his friend and coworkers quite civilly and goes out of his way to defend an Indian gentleman who is being discriminated against. But Jimmy's vulnerability and pain does leak out on occasion. I felt that I understood him best through his playing the trumpet. The solo he plays toward the end expresses such sadness, pain and despair that you feel you are getting to the core of the man. After the solo in the nightclub, the audience is stunned into silence.

I found the atmospheric black and white photography and editing to be impressive. There are many abrupt cuts from one scene to the next that at first I found discordant, but then I came to appreciate them - why linger on a scene when its essence has been established. And the quick cuts are consistent with, and help establish, the emotional tone.

This role for Burton could be considered a warm-up for his great performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." There he had a sparring partner in Elizabeth Taylor who could give back whatever he dished out.

Technically speaking, "Look Back in Anger" is a well made film. Despite that, it's also an incredibly unpleasant picture...so unpleasant that I wonder how many people can actually see the entire movie.

Richard Burton plays a completely unlikable jerk. Despite having a college degree, he works a low-paying working class job and would do nothing else. This is because he is seething with contempt for the upper classes and would much rather be poor and angry than anything else. This is a super-serious problem considering he's married to an upper-class girl. And, he makes it his life's work to destroy her and make her feel completely devalued. Boht of these folks are friends with a guy who likes them both...which seems very tough considering he sees his friend mistreating his other friend all the time.

If you can stand Burton's very famous film, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", then you MIGHT be able to appreciate and enjoy "Look Back in Anger". As for me, like is just too short to spend this much time watching someone emotionally (and occasionally physically) torture another human being. Very unpleasant.

LOOK BACK IN ANGER has the distinction of being one of the first kitchen sink dramas that would become all the rage in the early 1960s. It's an adaptation of the famous John Osborne play about an angry young man and the love triangle in which he finds himself involving his wife and her best friend. I was surprised to see that Nigel Kneale adapted the story for the screen as this is well away from his comfort zone of science fiction and weirdness.

The film features a typically bullish performance from Richard Burton as the protagonist who spends the entire running time bullying the women in his life (apart from his mother, as he loves her). Yes, the film is in essence a couple of of hours of Burton abusing people, so I didn't find it particularly entertaining. The characters are certainly well drawn with plenty of depth and more than realistic, but as a slice-of-life story nothing much really happens during the running time (there are no character arcs or anything like that) and I was left feeling depressed about what I'd just watched more than anything else.