Educating Rita

Julie Walters plays Rita, a working-class hairdresser who signs on for adult education classes and chooses alcoholic hack Frank Bryant (Michael Caine) as her tutor. As Rita's intellectual horizons expand, she becomes torn between her stifling home life and the alluring, but pretentious, world of her amorous professor. Adapted by Willy Russell from his stage play, this is a poignant if predictable take on the English class system, buoyed by an effervescent performance from Walters (though Caine gets the best line: "Life is such a rich and frantic form that I need the drink to help me step delicately through it"). Caine, Walters, and Russell were all nominated for Ac...