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As Terence Stamp put it in his autobiography, 'One day we were all dogsbodies. The next, we were Jack the lads.'

Working-class lads, he meant - what people in British films had seldom been allowed to be before the Sixties. Three classics of that time are being rereleased this week - they'll show a Britain oddly similar in topography to today's, yet light years away in attitude.

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning opens at a work-bench in a bicycle factory where an overalled Albert Finney counts the boring bits and pieces he's shaping and mouths a soliloquy of mute rebellion: 'A few more and that's the last for a Friday. I could get through it in half the time - but they'd only slash me wages, so they can get stuffed. Don't let the bastards grind you down.' In some respects, it still sounds like neo-bolshy Trades Union Congress of 2002 - but in 1960, no speech like that had been heard on the lips of an actor in a British film.

No F-words yet, but its vernacular directness was alien to our cinema's traditionally polite, middle-class language. And so was an actor like Finney. Himself a lower-middle-class boy turned actor, he possessed the naturalistic vitality of a workingclass environment. An anti-hero, and sexy with it. Soon he's in bed with a workmate's wife. The working classes enjoying illicit sex! God knows what Britain was coming to.

Karel Reisz's film based on Alan Sillitoe's screenplay hadn't the rage of Osborne's Look Back In Anger, or the upwardly mobile hankering of Jack Clayton's Room At The Top. It was tougher stuff - with a class truculence, a swagger, about it. Finney's Arthur Seaton wouldn't have been aware he was a member of the oppressed proletariat - so long as he had opportunities to whore, booze and fight, 'all the rest is propaganda'.

British cinema didn't only come of age with Reisz's film, or with this week's other re-release, The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, made in 1962. Rather, it came into a different age. One in which the new boys (and girls), beneficiaries of Beveridge's Education Act, translated their post-war awareness of social ills into movies that were rough, realistic, iconoclastic (even nihilistic) and, above all, working-class. The Shaftesbury Avenue accent - that awful millstone-in-the-mouth that weighs down some of even the best pre-war British films --was out. The wagging tongues of

Why so suddenly in the Sixties did this revolution occur? Because of the generational change - as always a harbinger of revolution in the arts - that brought young talents into power on stage and screen.

Tony Richardson, who directed The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, was another middle-class graduate with guilty hankerings for the energy of the underclass. He found it in Tom Courtenay, as a boy sent to a borstal who's entered for the race against a team from a public school. Ahead of his nearest rival, he stops dead a few yards short of winning, so as to spite the hopes and affront the class of the institution's governor, who's played with rich Establishment aplomb by Michael Redgrave. Alan Sillitoe again wrote the screenplay. Yet although it linked 'anger' and 'revolt', the film is more of a romantic gesture than a 'class' one.

Courtenay's young thief has no Marxist rage - if anything, he's a case-hardened conservative with a vested interest in the status quo typical of the petty metropolitan criminal. But the film has the sound and look of rebelliousness - as well as the stylistic urgency that Richardson's invigorating co-opting of the rule-breaking French nouvelle vague gives it.

Once these films had signalled a breakthrough - and proved they were box-office - the cinema really 'discovered' a Britain seldom pictured before then - in films such as Richardson's 1961 A Taste Of Honey (Rita Tushingham's plain-Jane heroine, pregnant, with Murray Melvin as her proto-gay 'carer') and Lindsay Anderson's 1963 This Sporting Life (Richard Harris as a miner striving to release the libido in Rachel Roberts as his puritan landlady and turning into a muddied behemoth as a rugby league bruiser). Even in John Schlesinger's 1962 A Kind Of Loving (a white-collared Alan Bates as a young man 'trapped' into the state of marriage by pregnancy), what R.F. Delderfield, in 1958, famously called 'the dreaming suburbs' were revealed to have their nightmares of class oppression. For the first time, a new generation of stars was placed solidly in the context of factory work-bench, back streets and soot-streaked brick.