With grateful thanks to NC for the loan, this evening we watched Guy Green’s (British) 1960 classic, The Angry Silence, starring Richard Attenborough (and with Malcolm Arnold’s music and a cameo appearance from a very young but already smouldering Oliver Reed). The story is about an independent-minded factory worker, Tom (Attenborough), already out of the ordinary for having a beautiful Italian wife (Pier Angeli), who refuses to take part in unofficial industrial action and is at first ostracised and then persecuted by his fellow workers as a scab. Some of the script is over the top (such as the shadowy figure of a – communist? anarchist? – agitator sent from ‘London’ to encourage the unofficial action and hence damage the industry’s chances of surviving vis-à-vis foreign competition), and it created more than a little controversy because of its apparent anti-union bent. But one of the more chilling clevernesses of the plot is the way management sides with the strikers against Tom, preferring to swallow its pride and restore social peace so as to maintain its place in the competition for a big contract, and it also gives a good illustration of how, sometimes, stupidity (whether of management or of the louts among the workers) is difficult to distinguish from evil. Pier Angeli’s blistering performance throws into sharp relief what might have been if she had not suddenly died before filming of The Godfather started.