Although Schlesinger was loosely associated with Free Cinema early in his career, in interviews he insisted that he did not share the more tendentious and ideological aesthetic of Free Cinema's most notable artists. When asked by Buruma if he thought the more political directors of his era like Lindsay Anderson might have considered his humanism bourgeois, Schlesinger replied, “Oh, yes, I'm sure they all thought I was bourgeois, which I probably was and am. But I wasn't going to ask forgiveness for what I believed interesting and valid. Humanistic cinema was something I was very attached to” (Buruma 2006, 44).

By “humanistic cinema,” a phrase that Schlesinger repeats in his conversations with Buruma, he generally means cinema in which an illuminating focus on the relations among individuals is of greater concern to the director than advancing a particular set of political beliefs. Schlesinger's examples include the films of De Sica— “I absolutely worshipped the ground De Sica walked on,”— Kurosawa and Federico Fellini (Buruma 2006, 41, 75). In answer to Buruma's observation that directors like Anderson “wanted to change the world or change society, which was perhaps never your main concern,” Schlesinger agrees, but insists that he was nonetheless determined “to shake it up […] and to deal with topics that were not the-run-of-the-mill” (45). He gives the example of Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), a film set in London of the seventies about a Jewish homosexual doctor's relations with a young man who is also involved with a woman. Another example of course would be Midnight Cowboy, originally given an “X” rating for its nudity, explicit homosexuality and obscene language, a classification that was changed to “R” after the film won the Academy Award for Best Film of 1969.

In The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, Raymond Williams writes that much of the “serious art of the past hundred years— in film as clearly as anywhere— is in fact the work of dissident bourgeois artists” and that in the practice of popular cinematic art, in particular, we see radically different cultural tendencies overlapping. It is possible to “go on from [the work of dissident bourgeois filmmakers] to socialism,” he insists, or to “go back from it to variously idealized pre-capitalist social orders: hierarchical, organic, pre-industrial, pre-democratic” (Williams 1989, 114– 15).