Superb actors and impressing photography and direction is not enough to raise this film from its deplorable story and terrible environment, style and commonplace vulgarity, where men duel by drinking beer, have love affairs with married women and make them pregnant, live by constant lies and shoot at old bag ladies with air guns. It's a great and masterful film but can't hide its dominant element of bitterness. Karel Reisz would later on make an even worse film with Albert Finney as a psychotic murderer which is equally good but even more revolting, leaving a bitter aftertaste that's difficult to shake off. The industrial chimneys, a working-place of only noise, fisticuffs at night and getting drunk constitutes the total reality of this masterpiece of humdrum banality. Still, it has its moments.