Mary Rizza

Writer and novelist

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The ring of truth: How Green Finger by Adam Faith showed us that all that glitters is not gold (Retro Records)

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If only Poundland had existed in 1960, and if only the company had at that point come up with its wheeze of selling engagement rings for £1.

If the concept of a ring for a quid had been available, as a genuine ‘placeholder’, or as a joke, or as an ironic comment on the commercialisation and commodification of love and romance (not that we did this kind of irony, back in the day), then singer Adam Faith wouldn’t have told the sad story of how he lost his his girlfriend, all because of an engagement ring.

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The Seedy Side of Soho in the Swinging Sixties: The Small World of Sammy Lee — Retro Films

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Oh, the Swinging Sixties, full of fun, glamour and excitement. The clubs! The girls! The boys! The streets paved with boutiques! In 1963 we are moving well into the decade of fab, just three years before Time Magazine hailed London as The Swinging City, but the The Small World of Sammy Lee, written and directed by Ken Hughes, depicts a different reality.

The film tracks a day in the life of Sammy Lee, the title character incredibly well played by Anthony Newley. Sammy is a small-time gambler and crook, who earns a living working as a compere in a strip club, hustling to keep his head above water and make ends meet.

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Peyton Place Revisited — Would You Want To Go Home Again?

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As Thomas Wolfe famously said, You Can’t Go Home Again. Re-reading Grace Metalious’s hugely successful 1956 blockbuster novel Peyton Place is an unsettling experience.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the novel was a byword for forbidden literature. It was read in secret, in private, and hidden from children. Well-thumbed copies were surreptitiously passed from hand to hand. Those who did not dare bring it into their homes made frequent visits to bookstores and read it (or the sexy bits at least) in instalments.

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Down in the Valley — How Jeannie C Riley Socked It to the Harper Valley PTA

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It’s 50 years since a certain Mrs Johnson, resident of Harper Valley, USA, marched into her daughter’s school and disrupted a meeting of the Parent Teacher Association. In 1968, singer Jeannie C Riley took Tom T Hall’s song Harper Valley PTA to the top of the charts, and plunged us into a world made familiar by books, films and songs.

The song immediately creates the atmosphere of a close-knit community in a picket-fence town, with a church or two, a minister, a doctor, a diner, a bar, a milk bar, a high school, right and wrong sides of the tracks, and a cast of people, saints and sinners with quirks and oddities.

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Sharp at Heart: Why We Should Resist the Appeal of Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp

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SPOILER ALERT: This article references events in the novel Vanity Fair.

Becky Sharp is the central character in William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1840 novel Vanity Fair. It’s not right to call her the heroine, because the author states that this work is a novel without a hero. Nevertheless, whenever Vanity Fair re-emerges in our consciousness, courtesy of a film or TV adaptation, the character of Becky is seized upon and positioned as a representative of the age and as a role model for women.

We love her pluckiness, her bad-assness, her determination. We admire the way she carves her own path from ignominious beginnings to mixing with the cream of society without needing a man to save her. She is ambitious, whip-smart, ultra-modern. See how she reinvents herself, creates her own brand! She would be all over social media. Just imagine her Instagram account! Hey, she would be a match for Kim Kardashian!

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European Existenialism Meets the Midlands of the 1950s in The Match by Alan Sillitoe

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The Match is a (very) short story, published in the UK in 1959 as part of Alan Sillitoe’s collection The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner. The title refers to a Saturday afternoon football match between Notts County and Bristol, the setting and subject matter immediately linking Sillitoe to the ‘angry young men’ of the 1950s, whose gritty, realistic depictions of post-war working-class life present their disillusion with the conservative values of the establishment and their refusal to accept the social conventions of a class-ridden society.

However, the breadth of Alan Sillitoe’s work and interests is not truly reflected in this positioning. The Match has often been likened to James Joyce’s short story Counterparts, published in the Dubliners collection, and the French editors of the story were struck by its similarity to the work of Albert Camus.

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How Schoolgirls’ Own Stories Showed the Way to a Wider World for Women

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On the face of it, the books published by the Schoolgirls’ Own Library should have come with a warning sticker: ‘This book can seriously damage your enjoyment of reading’. What schoolgirl, or indeed schoolboy, could be expected to wade through 64 pages of poor-quality paper (post-war paper shortage, people) with tiny print, in columns, no illustrations, no reader-friendly white space, nothing to make reading easy or pleasurable other than the words?

Even in the entertainment desert of the 1950s, surely this was more punishment than pleasure. But no, we loved them.

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Looking Back at Look Back In Anger

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Look Back In Anger, John Osborne’s seminal play, is a work whose impact is shaped by its context. You really had to be there, at the Royal Court Theatre in London on May 8th 1956, to experience the full weight of its combination of searing rhetoric and challenging subject matter.

Those of us who experienced the play in the following years may wonder why the play created such a stir, but such is the case with work which is ground-breaking in its time.

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What’s it Really All About, Alfie?

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Bill Naughton’s creation Alfie Elkins has had several outings since his first appearance in the 1962 radio play Alfie Elkins And His Little Life. In addition to the radio drama, this character has sustained a stage play, a novel and a sequel, a 1965 film and a 2004 remake.

Alfie Elkins turned out to have legs, the most notable being those of Michael Caine, the star of Lewis Gilbert’s 1965 movie Alfie, in which Caine’s long lean frame is stylishly clad in Mod-inspired duds such as low-rise grey tapered trousers and Chelsea boots. There’s also a double-breasted blazer bearing an RAF badge, worn without the irony with which military dress was adopted as a fashion later in the decade.

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Hello Dolly — How Widows TV series took women away from being gangsters’ molls and made them the gangsters

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It begins with a classic Sweeney-type chase, as three armed robbers and their driver follow a security van across Waterloo Bridge in London. In the Kingsway Tunnel, now known as the Strand Underpass, the security van explodes and three men meet a horrific end.

Move away now, avert your eyes from their charred bodies and focus on the women who are left to grieve their demise — the Widows.

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