People are voting emotionally.

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

I've seen over thirty Richard Burton movies, and there really isn't any good reason to watch this one. Even if you particularly like his acting, all he does is shout cruelties for ninety minutes. And even if you particularly like Claire Bloom, she wears one deadpan expression for ninety minutes. There's just no point to Look Back in Anger, besides an intriguing title.A married couple doesn't get along, and for no explained reason a mutual male friend lives with them in their English flat. Also, for no explained reason, the male friend never stands up to Richard Burton when he berates his wife. And, it's never really explained why the two were married in the first place, or why they haven't thrown in the towel since whatever they have isn't working. Claire Bloom invites her actress girlfriend Mary Ure to stay with them for a couple of weeks, and even though Richard and Mary claim to hate each other, we can all guess what's going to happen. Figure that you've guessed correctly and rent Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? instead.

Richard Burton, the worst actor of all time, overacts like never before in this dated crapfest. Burton, a wooden film actor who just copied Laurence Olivier, shouts his way through the entire film as he always did. Despite being from a working class background he could never portray working class characters convincingly. As if that were not bad enough, at 33 he was far too old to play Jimmy Porter. They mention that Jimmy is only 25, well Burton looked early 40s due to his alcoholism and chain smoking. Such a pity that they had to cast a far too old Burton, a graduate of the shouting school of acting, instead of Kenneth Haigh, star of the original acclaimed West End version. At least Haigh would only have been 27 at the time of filming, easily able to pass for 25. The whole story is uninteresting, dated and irrelevant.

To watch "Look Back In Anger" so many decades after its brief era of relevancy is to encounter a head-scratchingly pointless film and wonder what all of the yelling was about. This dank and claustrophobic look at one of Britain's army of post-war "Angry Young Men" might be a tad more bearable were Richard Burton asked to take it down a notch. Burton's endless bellowing (second only to Peter O'Toole's bray-as-acting style) is ill served by it never being made quite clear just what this guy is so miffed at all the time.Surrounded by characters that either incomprehensibly find him a lovable lad (Gary Raymond, Edith Evans) or serve as doormats (Mary Ure, Claire Bloom), Burton's character is given free rein to act like a colicky brat for most of the film without ever giving us much of a clue as to the root of his dissatisfaction. Brief references to Britain's class system, racial injustice, loss of loved ones and any number of social ills feel insufficient as explanations to the source of Burton's unpleasant personality. After 40 minutes or so of being subjected to one narcissistically histrionic rage after another, one just wishes he'd shut up and realize that he isn't the only one suffering…he's just the only one who seems hell-bent on making sure others are as miserable as he is.That being said,the entire film is not devoid of certain pleasures (the photography is appropriately dingy, Claire Bloom is always a delight and Gary Raymond, so good in "Suddenly Last Summer," was a real surprise here with a more sizable role) but it's near unbearable being subjected to a film about a man feeling sorry for himself non-stop. It struck me as being sophomoric in theory and tedious in execution.If this film reminds me on anything, it's of an episode of "The Flintstones" where Fred is cast with wife Wilma in a kitchen-sink domestic drama about an abusive, lout of a husband and his meek wife. The show's title: "The Frogmouth," a perfect subtitle for this mess- Richard Burton in "Look Back in Anger aka The Frogmouth."

In 1956 John Osborne stood the British theatre world on it's ear with his rage filled play Look Back in Anger. The Empire was backpedaling, and Osborne's play was a loud broadside to the establishment and the genteel upper crust drawing room plays that dominated the London stage. It was the opening salvo of British generational discontent that would go beyond the stage to film and music and create a social revolution. In England the era of question authority had arrived.Jazz loving, university educated Jimmy Porter seethes with anger over everything around him. Living in a cold water flat with his wife Alison (Mary Ure) and friend Cliff he goes into rages at the drop of the hat lashing out cruelly at the housemates. In one instance he viciously tears into Alison wishing she would have a child and that once bonded to her hoped it would die. When Helena (Claire Bloom) , a school friend of Alison comes to visit she is treated in the same fashion. A pregnant Alison decides to leave as does Cliff and Porter takes up with Helena, his angry young man persona toned down slightly but only for the moment.Look Back in Anger echoed a real sense of urgency for it's day. Osborne's Porter speaks for a generation and class that was invisible and powerless at the time. Anger revels in the sun setting on the Empire and those who created it. The open air push cart market that Porter works in serves as a symbolic battle field where corrupt authorities act like martinets and practice veiled racism. Half a century later though this iconoclastic work has lost a large amount of its controversial steam.As Porter, Richard Burton seethes from start to finish. Every word he utters cuts. Burton's magnificent voice gives powerful expression to Osborne's words but his overall performance is one over the top non-stop ugly whine. There are only tid bits of humor and joy in his character that moves from one rage to the next. This gets tired fast since Porter is unable to channel his anger to change good or bad. It is just one long hissy fit. As lovers and targets Mary Ure and Claire Bloom stand around looking shell shocked most of the time. Their performances are lifeless as they endure tirade after tirade from Jimmy with battered understanding. By film's end there is no character left to respect or performance to admire. It's like listening to your neighbors argue for two hours.Anger was the "kitchen sink drama" archetype but is clearly inferior to most similar films that followed such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Sporting Life and The Entertainer, which Osborne also wrote and had the same director (Tony Richardson). In those works the characters had more dimension than the howling Burton and his comatose victims and a basic theatrical understanding of comedy relief which in Look Back in Anger goes down the drain fast.