Poor Cow (also known as No Tears for Joy) is a 1967 British kitchen sink drama film directed by Ken Loach and starring Carol White and Terence Stamp.

[5] 18-year-old Joy, who comes from a big family with an alcoholic mother and womanising father, leaves home to marry Tom and they have a son, Johnny.

After briefly sharing a room with her Aunt Emm, an aging prostitute, Joy moves in with Dave, one of Tom's criminal associates.

Dave is tender and understanding, but the idyll is shattered when he is sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment for leading a robbery which results in a woman being blinded, and given his long criminal record, early release seems unlikely.

When Tom is released, Joy goes back to him after he promises to move her from her small grotty flat to a modern well-furnished house.

Realising how much Johnny means to her, Joy decides to stay with Tom despite the abuse, but continues to dream of a future with Dave.

[15] For the last two weeks of filming White also worked on I'll Never Forget What's'isname which Loach says caused a number of scheduling problems.

"[7] Critic Alexander Walker wrote "social realism was mixed with enough raw language, that caught the authentic tone of the street corner, and randy attitudes to sex to insure it the profitable shock of recognition where the popular audience was concerned.

The review characterised Loach's direction as an "incongruous mixture of realism and romanticism" that, along with the cinematography, "suffuses the material in a cheery glow of lyricism that often verges on sentimentality.

[20] Film critic Renata Adler of The New York Times wrote in her review: "Poor Cow, which opened yesterday at the Murray Hill and other theaters, begins with some shots of the real birth of a baby, and goes on to become one of those ringingly false Technicolor British films about working-class life in London.

"[21] In his 2½ star review, Roger Ebert stated that it "isn't a very good movie" but also labeled it as a potential sign for a new phase in recent British films of the time distinct from the social realism and satire films of the time as one made "in equal parts of squalor and techniques.

[25] Clips of Stamp's performance in Poor Cow were used to show the early life of Wilson, the character he portrays in Steven Soderbergh's film The Limey (1999).