The social and the psychological elements of David Storey's In Celebration build rather slowly but nevertheless very strongly to an emotional peak which is tremendously moving…. The result is a love-hate drama, risking sentimentality in its determination to be honest, and succeeding in Lindsay Anderson's skilled marshalling of the … cast…. (p. 29)

Once, during the slow stuff early on, Anderson cuts well away to a short sequence when Colin picks up Andrew in his car on their way north, and this abrupt intrusion of familiar action-type cinema, as opposed to the cinema-of-words that prevails, is arguably a mistake. It increases my surprise at the omission of some short visual observations—a montage, maybe—of the actual celebratory dinner…. [Such] events, of course, are not anything more in themselves than circumstances which bring out the dramatic essence of the plays, and in the theatre we accept the convention that the...