STEPHEN McCLARENCE makes a visit to Nottingham on the 50th anniversary of the era-defining film Saturday Night And Sunday Morning

GOOD NEWS for merry men (and women) in the Midlands: it's Robin Hood Month in Nottingham. To mark the release of Ridley Scott's new Robin Hood film, starring Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett, there will be falconry, "have-a-go jousting" and a chance to make "funky armour". I've left my green tights at home, however.

I'm here to celebrate the 50th anniversary of another locally linked film about an "outlaw", Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, the no-punches-pulled study of working-class life that made a star of the young Albert Finney and brought a gritty new realism to British cinema.

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The Nottingham-born writer Alan Sillitoe, who died last weekend, based the screenplay on his 1958 novel, which slapped the label Angry Young Man on him. It centres on Arthur Seaton, a cocky Brylcreem-quiffed factory worker w ho sums up his contempt for authority in the famous line: "Don't let the bastards grind you down."

To be true to Seaton's spirit, I should probably be spending my own Saturday night and Sunday morning in Nottingham getting riotously drunk, brawling and p icking up women. My wife is with me though so I make do with a more civilised weekend.

Some of the locations used in the film are still recognisable but things have inevitably changed.

The White Horse pub, a corner b oozer with green Victorian tiles, is being converted into a café while the Castle Terrace now overlooks retail parks rather than smoking chimneys, and the canal, where Seaton spends his Sundays fishing, now bobs with bright narrowboats.

Over to the west of the city the terraced house where Sillitoe was born has been knocked down and the Raleigh bicycle factory, where he worked after leaving school at 14, has been replaced by student apartments. One block is called Sillitoe Court in his honour but the old Finney's Bar alongside it was renamed The Beach Bar before owner Terry Crofts bought it three years ago. "My father worked at Raleigh from being a boy until he retired, " he says. "He loved the film for the shots of the factory."

Every other person I talk to knows people who appeared as extras in the film. It generates much local nostalgia not least because industry has given way to retail with Nottingham recently voted one of England's top five cities for shopping.

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On a sunny Saturday lunchtime the centre is heaving with shoppers but there's more charm a few hundred yards away in the Lace Market area, where lace-making once employed 17,000 people and many of its brick factories, warehouses and offices have been smartened up to create the thriving Latin Quarter.

At its heart is the Lace Market Hotel, a pioneering boutique hotel opened a decade ago in a pair of Georgian townhouses. We're staying here, in a comfortable room overlooking the glorious west front of St Mary's Church.

Along the road is Nottingham Contemporary, a radical new arts centre whose uncompromising concrete-slab design is said to "grow" on people.

The Lace Market merges into Hockley, "the Soho of Nottingham", with its pavement cafés, retro shops and arty bohemian air. A good vantage point is The Larder on Goosegate, a relaxed first-floor restaurant in the building where Jesse Boot opened his first chemist's shop. The quality of the food and service is as high as the ceilings. Turn the corner and, if you weren't looking out for it, you might miss Screen Room, believed to be the world's smallest cinema (it seats 21), which I've arranged to visit. Through a door down a narrow alley, manager Stephen Jones is ready with a guided tour.

"This is the box office, " he says.

"This is the toilet and that's the cinema. So you've almost done the tour. I've put a film on that you might recognise." There on screen is Finney eating his factory sandwiches and pouring his tea from a flask in Saturday Night And Sunday Morning.

So to Saturday night itself.

Nottingham is a popular place for stag and hen parties and here in the hotel bar is a group of women in pink top hats with a blow-up male mannequin to keep the bride-to-be company. A Wonder Woman group teeters past the window as we retreat into the hotel's atmospheric Cock & Hoop gastropub for a cosy meal.

Driving home after a quiet Sunday morning browsing round the fine art gallery, we switch on the news and discover that Sillitoe died just hours earlier.

Suddenly and poignantly our celebration weekend becomes a tribute. Sillitoe was no sentimentalist, however. He would have liked the story a shopkeeper tells us about seeing a man dressed as Robin Hood leading a horse the wrong way along a one-way street. "Oi, Robin Hood, " he shouted. "This is a one-way street!" "I don't care, " the man shouted back. "I'm an outlaw."

Another Angry Young Man.

GETTING THERE:
Lace Market Hotel (0115 852 3232/ www.lacemarkethotel.co.uk) offers doubles from £79 (two sharing), B&B.
Nottingham Tourism Centre: 0844 477 5678/www.discovereastmidlands.com