Blue-Eyed Boy

When American movie actors come suddenly to fame, they are often top-heavy with inexperience, running dangerously before a full gale of publicity. With English actors, it is usually the other way round: their training and experience are so solid that their achievement of prominence seems inevitable rather than lucky.

The latest of these is Tom Courtenay, who plays the young delinquent hero in the film version of Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. He looks like malnutrition itself--hollow cheeks, hair too long, sallow skin that seems to harbinger a tic. He might well have been plucked off the streets by some director casting a social-protest story. He was raised, as a matter of fact, in the slums of Hull. But he was educated at the University of London, trained by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and apprenticed by the Old Vic.

Delicate Equilibrium. Albert Finney became an international star when Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was circulated around the world. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, scheduled for release in the U.S. this autumn, is an equally good film, and Courtenay's performance has all the detailed excellence of Finney's. He plays Colin Smith 993, an inmate at Her Majesty's Borstal prison at Ruxton Towers. The place is a stately old home landscaped with barbed wire (Sillitoe's way of saying "this sceptered isle"). Smith, son of a factory worker, is the natural enemy of the Establishment. He is a convicted burglar who feels no guilt, only odium. The one thing he can do well is run. The warden (Michael Redgrave) trains him as the long-distance runner who will triumph for the Borstal prison in the first sports day ever arranged between the boy convicts and the amiable young gentry from a nearby school. But this only sets the boy up to establish a sort of world's record in basic hatred, which he sets at the startling finish of the race and the picture.

To prepare for the role, Courtenay studied photographs of Czechoslovakian Runner Emil Zatopec, showing a face contorted by the strain of the marathon. Behind a camera truck, Courtenay ran for mile after mile, imitating Zatopec. But the real skill of his performance is more apparent when he is testing the roadworthiness of a stolen car, sitting home watching a peer on the telly, or walking a Skegness beach with his girl. In the first instance he displays pure boyish enthusiasm, then boyish iconoclasm, then a thoroughgoing experience of love. In each case, the emotion comes through as basic ally right but begrimed in an unhealthy context, which is what the film is trying to express from start to finish. Consistently, Courtenay preserves a delicate equilibrium between sympathy and repulsion; he manages to suggest a worthless hood who might have been a gifted contributor to another society--not a nice chap gone wrong, but rather a congenitally wrong one who might have gone right. Because this sort of role is so easy as a cliche (the whore with the 14-carat heart), it is extraordinarily difficult to do honestly. Courtenay does it with an honesty so ruthless that it makes the film profoundly depressing.

Bitten Finney. Bright, miserably shy and introverted, Courtenay himself is the living opposite of the boy he plays on film. His father spent his working lifetime painting trawlers. "The only way he could have earned less than he did was not to have worked at all," says Tom. But in stead of filling him with resentment, Courtenay's humble beginnings inspired him. Under Britain's weed-killing series of national examinations, only one in thousands from a background like Courtenay's ever receives more than an elementary education. Courtenay was the one.

He was a "blue-eyed boy" -- so the English put it -- winning scholarships all the way to the university level.

First applauded by critics for his Konstantin in the Old Vic's 1960 production of The Seagull, he later spread his reputation in a TV role as an army private who spoils a mission by breaking silence with the cry that he is having a vision of God.

But Courtenay's merit as a star was not secured until he replaced Albert Finney last year in the West End's long-running Billy Liar. Critics who had slobbered all over Finney for his dazzling performance in the role watched Courtenay do it, then turned and bit Finney. Finney's great performance, they decided, had been "out side the play" compared with Courtenay's wellsprings of insight.

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