The so-called 'British New Wave', of which Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is exemplary, emerged less out of the documentary roots of Free Cinema than in response to the burgeoning world of proletarian drama and literature. Of crucial importance for Reisz (and subsequently, Lindsay Anderson, whose first feature was an adaptation of This Sporting Life) was the work of younger, second generation kitchen sink novelists such as Alan Sillitoe and David Storey who were just starting to emerge as important regional voices from the Midlands and Northern England. The film sets up a clear tension between Arthur's and Reisz's conflicting points-of-view, the former represented by Albert Finney's brash, physical stature, the latter expressed through formal style, allowing Reisz to foreground his character's perspective while at the same time showing it to be yet another example of 'received wisdom' doing its insidious work.