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It was announced today that the actor Albert Finney has died at the age of 82. With understandable predictability most of the reports focused on the whole 'Angry Young Man' angle and how he was a part of the new wave of post-war kitchen sink dramas. Reading through the various stories today it occurred to me that I have only seen him in three films. One of them is a film I really enjoyed, Tim Burton's Big Fish from 2003, although I hadn't remembered that he was in it.
Of the two films I refer to, the first is Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I don't necessarily think it is because I am from Nottingham that I got into the works of Alan Sillitoe but it was nice to discover from an English teacher at school that the world I was from had been committed to literature, and was certainly a lot more relatable than the Famous Five for example. Finney's portrayal of Arthur Seaton was almost exactly how you would imagine from reading the book, although he does prove that the Nottingham accent is a difficult one to pull off, something that Stephen Tompkinson demonstrated when he failed at it in the 2018 biopic Torvill & Dean.
Naturally this was the main focus of the reports in the local news, treating Finney as an honorary Nottingham person in much the same way they do with Brian Clough. The Nottingham Post and Leftlion do like to write about its notable people (nearly all of them anyway) and the Post in particular has no understanding of the word 'tenuous' so at least they had a reason to publish some photographs of the cast in the Market Square.
Anyway, although I have seen very few Albert Finney films, there is one in particular that I have seen a great many times. As regular readers of my blog or Twitter feed will know, I collect versions of A Christmas Carol, both books with different artwork and movie and audio adaptations. One of the highlights of our December viewing of the different versions of the film is Albert Finnay's Scrooge, a musical that I described on Twitter today as 'joyously bonkers'.
This particular movie adaptation of the A Christmas Carol story takes the story we know and love and liberally sprinkles it with batshit craziness. Finney's portrayal, which I have no doubt influenced Harry Enfield's Old Gits characters, has everything and more. Starting with the isolated and mean Scrooge and suddenly becoming overly enthusiastic while seemingly pissed up on the milk of human kindness and joining in with a game of The Minister's Cat despite the fact that nobody could see him. The scene in which Scrooge joins in with the first version of 'Thank You Very Much' while his coffin is wheeled away is unfortunately and inappropriately what popped into my head when I found out that he had died today. For someone known as a dramatic actor, Albert Finney just let his hair down and threw himself into the role with a reckless abandon and for that I tip my hat to him on the sad occasion of his passing.
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