Part of the Haringey Independent Film Festival "Visions of Home"

BRUCE CASTLE MUSEUM presents MOMMA DON’T ALLOW

Screening of this film, included in the BFI DVD compilation Free Cinema [1956] plus a couple of other shorts from this BFI compilation. In March 1954, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson submitted a proposal to the BFI Experimental Film Fund for a short documentary about a Saturday evening in a North London jazz club. The Fishmongers Arms in Wood Green.
The film was shot on 16mm film with a total grant of just £425 and completed in November 1955. Two months later it was screened at the NFT as part of a programme of BFI-funded films; the Press reviews were very encouraging. Momma Don’t Allow captures the emerging ‘youth culture’ (an erstwhile unheard of term) and is on the whole warm and sympathetic to its working-class subjects. It contrasts the relaxed, confident working-class Teddy Boys and their girlfriends with the more awkward ‘toffs’ whose arrival threatens to change the mood of the evening. Tony Richardson was the first of the Free Cinema directors to make the move into feature films. With the playwright John Osborne he set up Woodfall Film Productions. The company’s first release was an adaptation of Osborne’s stage hit Look Back in Anger (1959) and was directed by Richardson. The car manufacturer Ford appointed Karel Reisz as its film officer. Ford later funded Reisz’s own We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959)

Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, 1956, UK
Venue: Bruce Castle Museum, Lordship Lane, Tottenham, N17 8NU
Buses: 243, 123, 318
Admission: Free. Refreshments available
Doors open at 7:00pm. Film from 7:30pm to 9:00pm