et for consumer goods "seemed to indicate that poverty would soon be a thing of the past" (Murphy 115). The combination of higher wages, higher employment and "an Americanization typified by the advent of the supermarket, the laundrette, and the coffee bar" created a consumer society that was seemingly leading towards "a more open and essentially classless society" (Armes 237). At the same time, however, a significant portion of the British population under the age of thirty was developing a strong sense of discontent. Even though things were better for most people many youths believed that little was really changing and saw the middle-class values to which everyone aspired as repressive and dull and middle-class success as a dead end. This attitude was embodied in the dramatists and novelists, such as John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe, who, although they did not like to be lumped together as Angry Young Men, "shared an aversion to authority and were attuned to everyday speech," turning their scorn on many targets with antiheroes, usually from the North, who had no idea "how to escape their stifling jobs and impending marriages" (Sayre 15). Films such as the very successful Room at the Top (1959), the cinema version of Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) dealt with the discontents of the newly affluent working class. The character of Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) in Jack Clayton's Room at the Top, for example, was used to show how despite the supposedly classless orientation of the newly affluent society "the patronizing upper class, the self-made middle class anxious to preserve the status quo and a conservative and conformist working class" made upward movement in society a rare, difficult and ultimately shallow achievement (Richards 150).
More often, however, the angry and disillusioned young men in such films were, like Billy Fishe...