Suzy Kendall is immense as the definitive class tourist in this adaptation of Nell Dunn’s quasi-autobiographical novel about migrating from Chelsea to the savage and lawless environs of, ahem, Battersea, on the other side of the Thames. The film was mostly derided at the time for lacking the docudrama verve of an earlier Ken Loach TV version, but now it seems more vivid, more relevant and certainly more alive to the dilemma of Kendall’s protagonist.

She plays Polly Dean, a mansion-dwelling blue blood who packs in the Roller and the Chelsea butler for a chance, in the words of Jarvis Cocker, to live like common people, to see whatever common people see and, indeed, to sleep with common people like Pete, Dennis Waterman’s junk shop assistant. “People say what they feel here,” she says of life among the cor blimey egg-and-chips crowd. “They’re not repressed or hysterical!”

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Polly soon nabs a job in the local sweet-packing factory, where she befriends Maureen Lipman’s fiery Sylvie, the kind of ciggie-smoking, headscarf-wearing blue-collar brawler who says to loose-lipped co-workers, “I’ll tear your bleedin’ ’air off if you talk to me like that!” Lipman is the film’s secret weapon, her rendition of Manfred Mann’s I Need Your Love during a raucous knees-up a grandstanding highlight. Seen through Polly’s desperate eyes, though, the scene is also deeply moving.

Slickly directed by Peter Collinson, who also made The Italian Job, the film builds to a melodramatic climax that includes a botched abortion, a stolen Jaguar and a love match destroyed. Even though our sympathies are weighted towards Polly’s feminist journey of self-actualisation, we fear — as Pete suspects and Jarvis Cocker knows — that when the conflict becomes too intense or the needs too demanding, she will simply “call her dad” because he can stop it all.

The ending is poignant. The film is up there with Cathy Come Home, Darling, Alfie and This Sporting Life.
★★★★★
12, 114min
Blu-ray and buy/rent

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