What is striking about watching Saturday Night And Sunday Morning for the first time in 2003 is how unstriking it is. The screen-weary film addict has seen all this stuff - the gritty footage, the Northern working-class antihero, the girlfriend-up-the-duff, the fishwives and the factories, the brooding black-and-white cinematography, even the elegant jazz score - a thousand times and then a thousand more on television.

When the film was released in 1960, it had a freshness to it, much of which was down to the vitality and lustre of Albert Finney's central performance. He plays the first - or one of the first - antiheroes. Before that, the proletariat, especially up north, was either poor and oppressed, poor and shiftless, or just poor and shameless caricatures. The advent of the Angry Young Man, in film and print, changed all that. If nothing else, the advocates of Free Cinema released the working man from his stereotypical straightjacket and allowed him to be depicted, not as an empty representative of his class and age, but a fully-fleshed person in his own right.

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning was adapted by Alan Sillitoe from his first novel, for which, apparently, he received an advance of £90. It has many similar themes to his second, The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, published only a year later, but without The Runner's sense of tautness and direction.

As the disenchanted, anti-Establishment, anti-authority, anti-almost-everything hero of the piece, Finney spends much of the early part of the film swearing blind that he won't be caught in the same "dead from the neck up" trap as his parents' generation was and that altogether he is a freer, brighter spirit. His particular interpretation of this freedom involves drink, women - one married, one angling - and taking pot shots at the neighbourhood gossip with an airgun. The freedom is temporary. By the end, he seems to be heading right for what he professes to despise - a house, a wife, an inside toilet.

The journey is still an enjoyable one and Johnny Dankworth's sparse, elegant jazz score adds greatly to this. It is neither Sillitoe, nor director Karel Reisz's fault that occasionally the film feels like an educational trip into a cinematic set text, or that Finney's sullen fecklessness has been duplicated so often since.