Film Studies: A true English gentleman - even if he was from Czechoslovakia

Karel Reisz, who died last week, lived the greatest part of his life in England, in fashionable parts of north London (with his wife, the black-listed actress, Betsy Blair – she had been Oscar-nominated once, playing the shy girlfriend in Marty). He sounded thoroughly English, and his long-time friend and rival, Lindsay Anderson, was irritated at Reisz seeming unduly balanced, equable and reserved – in a word, too English. But there was troubled history beneath the composure. Reisz was Czechoslovak – born in 1926 in Ostrava, very close to the Polish border. He was Jewish, too, the son of a lawyer who got the boy to England in 1938, but who could not save himself. Both parents died in a concentration camp. And Karel, while still a teenager, was flying fighters for the Royal Air Force.

It's worth stressing that range of experience because in later years, after he had established himself in the Sixties as part of the new British cinema, Karel Reisz went off to Hollywood and made three films about extreme experience: The Gambler (1974), a James Toback screenplay about a New York literature professor (James Caan) who becomes enthralled by risk, gambling and Las Vegas; Sweet Dreams (1985), which went into the rural heart of country music, with Jessica Lange playing Patsy Cline; to say nothing of Who'll Stop the Rain (1978), the best film Reisz ever made.

But that world felt far away in the 1950s. Reisz read chemistry at Cambridge, and he became a schoolteacher for a few years. For a while, he saw no way to give voice to his own creative yearnings. Then he started writing about the movies, on the side, for Sequence, a small magazine based at Oxford. And in 1953, he wrote a book called The Technique of Film Editing – useful, academic and quietly inspiring, if nowhere near the real muddled passion of film-making. It was characteristic of Reisz that he had not been a film editor; he had taken it upon himself to approach film aesthetics through the discipline of editing.

But it promoted him into the company of film-makers, and so Reisz became a key figure in the Free Cinema movement, a tentative urge to bring fresh realism to documentary film. With Tony Richardson, Reisz made Momma Don't Allow (a study of the traditional jazz revival), and then in 1959, on his own, he made We Are the Lambeth Boys, a modest enquiry into the life of poor kids in south London. So he was very well placed in the small explosion of working-class feature films that occurred in the early Sixties. He directed Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, with Albert Finney, Rachel Roberts and Shirley Anne Field, taken from the Alan Sillitoe novel.

That film was over-praised, like many of the British films of that moment, and then a few years later Reisz had a serious flop with Night Must Fall, in which Finney played the young killer created by Emlyn Williams in his 1930s play. So far, Reisz had shown more notional willingness to make movies than profound drive. But he came to life in his next two pictures, Morgan (1966) and Isadora (1968). In part that may have been because he was moving away from a studious lower-class focus; in part, too, it may be that Vanessa Redgrave excited him more than Albert Finney. Both Morgan and Isadora could be accused of having naïve, or romantic politics, but they worked on screen, and they still do.

Not that Reisz ever made a great or unflawed film. Still, this is the place to consider Who'll Stop the Rain, adapted from Robert Stone's novel, Dog Soldiers. It's a story of Vietnam aftermath. John Converse is a coward, living in Berkeley, California, who has got involved in smuggling heroin back from south-east Asia. Hicks is the samurai-like soldier he uses as a carrier. And Marge Converse is the disenchanted wife who will become a heroin addict.

It's a film that moves from Asia to California and then goes into the back part of the desert. It's bleak, violent, nasty and entirely unrestrained. It's also one of the best movies about the moral damage Vietnam did to American society. The Converses are played by Michael Moriarty and Tuesday Weld, Hicks is Nick Nolte. I daresay the film is forgotten now, or out of fashion, but it's worth tracking down, and it's enough to remind you of all the dark forces Reisz worked so hard to keep under control.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk