Theatrical legend has it that when the curtain went up at London’s Royal Court Theatre for the opening night of John Osborne’s play “Look Back in Anger” in May 1956, the audience gasped when a realistically squalid attic flat with an ironing board dead center was revealed onstage. The realities of Britain’s declining imperial fortunes, widening class gap, and troubled economy weren’t supposed to be fodder for a night at the theater.

“At the time,” recalled the actress Vanessa Redgrave, herself in the audience that night, “New York theater was leading the way. Back in London, with all due respect to the various playwrights, everything was set in the old ways. It was like a little fortress, culturally speaking.”

Osborne’s caustic, passionate, and realistic autobiographical portrayal of a young couple brought low by class differences was instantly polarizing. “You’ve got to picture an England where young people had nothing to do and nowhere to go,” Ms. Redgrave said. “Nothing resonated with them, nothing.”

In the mid 1960s, for a generation of British youth feeling cheated in England’s present, dubious of its future, and disenfranchised from its past, “Look Back in Anger” struck a powerful chord.

It also struck a chord with a producer named Harry Saltzman. A Canadian native of eclectic tastes and varied background, Saltzman partnered with Osborne and the play’s director, Tony Richardson, to produce a film version of “Look Back in Anger” under the banner of Woodfall Films.

By doing so, the three men inaugurated a collaborative odyssey that would produce a handful of motion pictures as unique and influential as any made in Britain. Today, 14 of these pictures will go on display at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade theater in a retrospective series called “Leading the Charge: Woodfall Film Productions and the Revolution in ’60’s British Cinema.”

In the late ’50s, Britain’s eternally struggling film industry was dominated by American and European producers who took advantage of the UK’s native production quotas and incentives by casting American actors in low-budget films shot on English soundstages. “Until Woodfall, if British films were to be financed at all, they had to get American stars in them,” Ms. Redgrave said. But when Richardson’s film version of “Look Back in Anger” made its debut in 1958, it starred the Welsh born Richard Burton and the Glaswegian Mary Ure, two actors “who didn’t fit into the conformity of speaking BBC English,” as Ms. Redgrave described the era’s theatrical status quo.

Like the play that spawned it, “the film was an absolute knockout because the scenes in it were connected with things that many young people felt particularly strongly about,” Ms. Redgrave said. But the screen version, co-written with BBC stalwart Nigel Kneale, wasn’t your average play adaptation. After a pre-release screening held by Richardson for the cast of a stage production of “Othello” he was directing at Stratford upon Avon, Ms. Redgrave said that she and her fellow “Othello” cast members “felt that for the first time we were seeing a big break from not only English films, but American films.” In the early ’50s, through a film journal called Sequence magazine, Richardson, alongside critical colleagues and fellow future directors Karel Reisz and Lindsey Anderson, had championed the kind of documentary realism that had cropped up in world cinema after World War II, but had lately fallen out of regard.

Indeed, one of the highlights of Lincoln Center’s retrospective is Reisz’s criminally under-revived 1955 docu-aesthetic call to arms “Mamma Don’t Allow.” In other Woodfall treasures such as “Look Back in Anger,” “A Taste of Honey,” and “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” Richardson deftly folded a powerfully austere and dramatically sympathetic physical realism into his films by shooting on location and employing documentary film technique.

The Woodfall stamp of reality also extended into period films. By the early ’60s, mainstream British cinema had sustained a long tradition of colorful and stately period dramas and comedies such as the Korda Brothers’ “That Hamilton Woman” or Sir Laurence Olivier’s war time Shakespeare adaptations. “They’re terrific films,” Ms. Redgrave said, “but they’re set in the old way of cinema.” When Richardson’s film “Tom Jones” made its premiere in 1963, “every historical convention went up the chimney,” she said.

“Heroes,” offers the offscreen narrator in “Tom Jones,” “whatever high ideas we may have of them, are mortal and not divine. We are all as God made us, and many of us much worse.” Albert Finney, then a young and struggling actor, makes of Tom Jones a ribald warts-and-all costume drama anti-hero. Mr. Finney and the rest of the cast (including Lynn Redgrave, who will introduce the film at the Walter Reade), and Richardson’s handheld camera, set a sympathetically modern tone that places Henry Fielding’s 18th-century novel in “a symbiotic relationship with the ’60s,” as Ms Redgrave put it.

After “Tom Jones,” the costume drama would never be the same. The film’s shadow extends over both the brilliance of Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” and the superficial drape and gown froth of the Miramax generation.

Richardson and company’s new approach to British filmmaking was well received by native talent of varied vintage. “Older actors loved what happened,” Ms. Redgrave said. Laurence Olivier, for instance, shocked Osborn and Richardson when he avidly agreed to take the lead role in “The Entertainer.” And in 1968’s the “Charge of the Light Brigade,” three generations of actors, including John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, and Ms. Redgrave, who will introduce the Monday evening screening of the film, teamed to bring Richardson’s searing anti-war revisionist epic to the screen.

For “Charge of the Light Brigade,” Richardson, his cast, and writer Osborne created a sprawling tableau of political complacency and military folly that references Britain’s Suez Canal debacle, the French war in Algeria, and American missteps in Vietnam. Needless to say, response to the film at the time was galvanizing. “It wasn’t a polemical kind of film,” Ms. Redgrave said, “but the polemics that followed the film were enormous. I think it’s a masterpiece.”

Woodfall’s output slowed considerably in the 1970s. Yet, “the Woodfall influence has been tremendous,” said Michael Sheen, the co-star of Steven Frears’s film “The Queen,” and the current star of “Frost/Nixon” on Broadway. “Steven Frears, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, they’ve all carried on the Woodfall tradition,” he said.

Mr. Sheen, who starred in the ’90s British stage revival of “Look Back in Anger” and will introduce the film on Saturday night, wasn’t yet born when the curtain opened on that fateful opening night in 1956 and the Woodfall era began. Looking back himself, he compared it to a similarly American-influenced revolutionary movement in Britain. “It must have been like seeing the Sex Pistols for the first time,” he said. “Like Johnny Rotten crouched on the edge of the stage growling, ‘ever feel like you’ve been cheated?'”

Through July 26 (70 Lincoln Center Plaza at Broadway and West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).