...but if you've had a bellyful of that whole 'angry young working class man' era (1950s through to the 1970s) of film-making, replete with gritty depictions of how hard life - and the people living it - were (and this was true for the majority of Brits...for the majority of the 20th century!), you'll give this a miss, despite the excellent acting from acting luminaries such as the young Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts, etc (indeed, it's difficult to fault ANY of the performances in this film) and the then-cutting edge directing and relatively unusual theme of rugby in a working class area (generally known as the sport used to toughen up privileged middle-to-upper-class boys at private schools - no doubt it made for an excellent foreshadowing of the military, for which many of those boys were destined!). Personally, I found the whole thing compelling (due to the performances and the 'slice-of- history' aspect - before my time, but definitely well within the living memory of several of my English relatives) yet ultimately deeply depressing - and far two long/desperately in need of an edit; for one thing, the endless adaptations of 'real life' novels featuring working class animal-sexuality hero has been done to death in British cinema (pioneered of course by DH Lawrence, who was roughly 30 years ahead of his time and didn't live long enough to see the triumph of his 'type', though he, personally, paid a fairly high price for pioneering it); for another, the closed-down-emotions of various men and women/widows clearly suffering from various forms of unexplained post-traumatic stress syndrome (though it is never explained explicitly, it is clear that the leading lady's husband committed suicide because he was suffering from depression as a result of sustaining trauma during service in the war - something so many men struggled with; therefore, though she is attracted to the brash young (too young to have served) lodger who clearly wants her, he cannot relate to the extent of her own trauma of loss, grief and insecurity, which he clumsily attempts to 'snap her out of' in various mostly misfired ways, receiving absolutely no support or guidance from her or anyone else as to how to gain her trust and win her heart and hand!) - I just find watching this kind of mass misunderstanding and miscommunication and mangled affections and misread gestures of love and good intentions akin to watching a train wreck!!