Tom Jones

Tony Richardson's Tom Jones (1963) was the great popular triumph of the British New Wave, a riotous adaptation of Henry Fielding's sprawling novel that won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. After the kitchen-sink realism of films like A Taste of Honey, Richardson exploded into colour, costume and anarchic comic invention.

Albert Finney plays the irrepressible foundling Tom, his amorous misadventures carrying him across a vividly bawdy Georgian England, with Susannah York as his beloved Sophie and a gallery of British character actors around them. Richardson borrows freely from the French New Wave — jump cuts, sped-up chases, characters addressing the camera, a narrator winking at the audience — to match Fielding's playful tone, and the celebrated, ravenously suggestive eating scene became instantly famous.

A colossal box-office hit on both sides of the Atlantic, it brought art-house technique to a mass audience and helped make British cinema fashionable worldwide. Finney became a star, and the film's freewheeling style influenced the period comedy for years. Energetic, ribald and endlessly inventive, Tom Jones remains a high-water mark of 1960s British film-making — proof that a costume drama could be as wild and modern as anything around it. Its freewheeling marriage of art-house technique and mass entertainment proved hugely influential, and Finney's star turn made him one of the faces of the decade.