In Notting Hill's jazz club, coffee bar and bedsit land of the early 1960s, Joe Beckett is a young unemployed misfit and drifter whose life takes a turn for the worse when he encounters Richard Dyce, an ex-army officer.

Beckett travels to the old lady's house on the South coast, and prepares to murder her but loses his nerve and in a struggle, accidentally pushes her down a flight of stairs, killing her anyway.

[3] The job of directing eventually went to Michael Winner, who had made a number of low-budget movies including Play It Cool (1962).

"[4] Michael Winner wanted to cast Sean Connery, Oliver Reed, Julie Christie and James Mason but says the producer overruled him.

[6]Michael Winner said Angel "turned down Sean Connery for the other lead because he, too, was a B-picture actor, and James Mason for the villain because he was past it.

The screenplay, from the usually agile pens of Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, is disappointingly ponderous, while Michael Winner's direction is by turns portentous, fussy and nudgingly sly, and his handling of his players is, to say the least, unsure. ...

The script is mostly a series of loosely connected sketches, though the film's sole virtue nowadays is the location camerawork of Otto Heller that captures the then peeling and shabbily converted Regency houses that were riddled with dry rot and Rachmanism, which exchanged squalor for extortionate rents.

Stanley Black and Acker Bilk's music adds a cloying note to a movie that rarely rises above basement level.