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 went into colour and costume and let his comic invention run riot.

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

It was a colossal box-office hit on both sides of the Atlantic, bringing art-house technique to a mass audience and making British cinema fashionable around the world. Finney became a star, one of the faces of the decade, and the film's freewheeling manner shaped the period comedy for years afterwards. Tom Jones is still a high-water mark of 1960s British film-making, and the proof that a costume drama could be as wild and modern as anything around it. Few films of its era wear their ribaldry and their invention so lightly, or have aged with so much of their energy intact.