Seeing this for the first time I was surprised to discover it is actually set in 1947, making it a piece about Austerity rather than Angry Young Men. While Laurence Harvey is convincing as a scheming hustler, he never strikes me as a northerner, and not just because his Yorkshire accent comes and goes (sometimes he sounds like he's auditioning for Jud in Oklahoma -- are Yorkshire and Texas/Southern accents that closely linked?). Harvey is more like a penniless Russian nobleman eager to make his fortune by marrying BENEATH him, not ABOVE him like Joe Lampton here. Interesting that Harvey and Richard Burton, who both came from impoverished backgrounds, both had trouble playing working class characters.
"We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground..."
"We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground..."