After the foreign detours of Free Cinema 4 and 5, the organising committee took the opportunity to show their latest creations at the National Film Theatre once again. Free Cinema 6 was subtitled 'The Last Free Cinema', and sure enough proved to be the end of the series. It was screened between 18-22 March 1959, just over three years after the first programme.
Karel Reisz's We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959), following a group of youngsters around a youth club in Kennington, was funded by the Ford Motor Co., while Robert Vas' Refuge England (1959) - the story of a Hungarian refugee's first day in London - and Michael Grigsby's Enginemen (1959), about work in a locomotive shed on a winter morning, were sponsored by the BFI Experimental Film Fund. Only Elizabeth Russell's Food for a Blush (1959) - of which two extracts were shown in the programme - was self-financed. Each of the films described the lives of ordinary people with the respect and affection typical of Free Cinema.
Press reviews praised all of the films, and regretted Free Cinema's passing, but by now its key players had already moved on. Tony Richardson had set up his own production company Woodfall with playwright John Osborne, while Lindsay Anderson was directing at the Royal Court theatre and Reisz was soon to leave Ford to direct his first feature, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).
Christophe Dupin
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