[2] The film stars Laurence Harvey, once again playing Joe Lampton, with Jean Simmons, Honor Blackman and Michael Craig.

Four actors reprised their roles from Room at the Top: Harvey, Donald Wolfit, Ambrosine Phillpotts and Allan Cuthbertson.

In Room at the Top, Joe Lampton's escape from his working-class background through his seduction of, and marriage to, the daughter of a wealthy mill owner had been portrayed.

Joe's father-in-law, Abe Brown, is the mayor of the town, and mill owner (Illingworths, Thornton Rd, Bradford).

His vague stirrings of conscience and self-awareness are quickly drowned as soon as his own interests are at stake; but the film can't resist trying to have its cake and eat it, so that for the first half, his budding awareness of the hollowness of his way of life is allowed to assume almost heroic proportions, as though he really were crusading against the corruption and pretensions of his milieu.

Ted Kotcheff, starting off inauspiciously with a couple of ugly dramatic zooms as Abe Brown presides over his boardroom, directs with heavy reliance on TV-style close shots, and the brusque editing style looks like a desperate attempt to give the film some sort of momentum.

Laurence Harvey and Jean Simmons do their best with thankless roles, Donald Wolfit overacts enthusiastically, and the rest of the cast are inconspicuous, except for a marvellously languid Margaret Johnston, who relishes one wonderfully bitchy scene in which, aware that Susan has been sleeping with her husband, she tears the poor girl to pieces over the cocktail glasses.