The actress Betsy Blair, who died last week, at 85, in London, where she had lived for many years, is best remembered for her performance in the female lead in Marty (1955), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In fact, her Hollywood career had started cracking apart before she even got that role. A dancer and model when she was in her teens, Blair met Gene Kelly when he was working as a choreographer of the Billy Rose show Diamond Horseshoe and hired her for the chorus. In 1941, when she was 17, they married. That same year, she made her "straight" acting debut as the female lead in William Saroyan's The Beautiful People. She broke into movies in 1947 and had parts in such films as A Double Life and Another Part of the Forest. Unfortunately, the HUAC era of the blacklist was starting up, and Blair, who had been in a Marxist study group run by the actor Lloyd Gough, was politically vulnerable. (She later said that she had tried to join the Communist party but had been refused admission because her marriage to a relatively apolitical movie star would make her membership problematic.) The studio almost got cold feet about hiring her for Marty, but Kelly himself settled that one by telling the bosses that if she didn't get the job, he feared that he'd be too distraught to show up for work on his own big production, It's Always Fair Weather.

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It was only a matter of time before James Toback finally made a movie about Mike Tyson. But is that a good thing?

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WIth a BBC Radio documentary on the movement set to debut this weekend, the Guardian's Simon Hoggart spends some time remembering the Free Cinema movement of the late 1950s.  Now largely forgotten, the movement was nonetheless hugely influential at the time, popular with the working class whose lives it reflected on screen an instrumental in creating a new narrative focus in both British film and television.  (For Hoggart, there's a personal touch as well:  his father, Richard Hoggart, wrote a book in 1957 called The Uses of Literacy that reflected many of the same values and ideals as that of the Free Cinema movement.)

Looking at the movement from the perspective of 50 years later, it seems to represent a revolution so basic it's staggering that it ever seemed necessary:  Free Cinema (so named by its founder, the pioneering director Lindsay Anderson, because it was free of both the patriotic demands of wartime production and the commercial demands of mainstream cinema) wanted to do no more and no less than tell the stories of working-class Britons from all over the country, rather than simply focus on the stories of southern England's middle class and the aristocracy.  And yet the movies were so radical in their production methods (they were made with the cheapest available Bolex cameras, on budgets little more than a few hundred dollars) and so unique in their means (a number of them were funded as part of a community arts grant from a then-socially conscious Ford Motor Company, something that's almost unthinkable now) that the whole movement seems like something from a fantasy world.

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