"[8] Leslie Halliwell opined: "Blunt melodrama with strong kinship to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning [1960], strikingly directed and photographed amid urban grime and suburban conformity.

Crisply adapted by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, the film is like a scrapbook of typical human experience, with Schlesinger's eye for detail and his persuasive storytelling style creating characters who could have lived next door to you.

Michael Brooke wrote in Sight and Sound:[14]John Schlesinger's feature debut came comparatively late in the angry-young-men/kitchen-sink cycle, but it wears its 54 years rather better than many of its contemporaries, not least because some of its social concerns are just as pervasive today — in particular the impossibility of obtaining decent housing even when both halves of a married couple are in steady employment.

The couple in question are Vic Brown (Alan Bates) and Ingrid Rothwell (June Ritchie), not an ideal match on any level other than the basest, but forced to marry after she shyly confesses, in what by 1962 standards was extreme sexual explicitness, that "Something that should have happened hasn't: it's been 15 days."

When they are forced — by penury and Ingrid's unrealistic domestic ambitions — to move into her mother's fussily maintained semi, it's clear from the moment that Thora Hird first wrinkles her nose at her new son-in-law that things aren't going to go well.