This is a late 60's/early 70's example of British "kitchen-sink realism" that began in the late 50's with films like "Saturday Night, Sunday Morning" and really continues up into the present day with the films of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. Strangely, the late 60's/early 70's Swinging London era was an especially fertile period for these films, even though many of them--"Up the Junction", "Deep End", "I Start Counting"--were so provincial and working-class British, you'd never guess that anything extraordinary was happening in London at the time.
For whatever reason (perhaps there was a law?) every appealing young Brit actress of that era seemed to have to make at least one movie where she has a romance with a man old enough to be her father. Judy Geeson got stuck with Rod Steiger in "Three Into Two won't Go" and her younger sister Sally Geeson REALLY got stuck with Norman Wisdom (the UK's answer to Jerry Lewis) in "What's Good for the Goose". Susan George got romantically paired with the somewhat older Michael York in "The Strange Affair" and the much older Charles Bronson in "Twinky". Haley Mills avoided this IN MOVIES, but in real-life married her much older director Roy Boulting. And art actually imitated life for Jane Birkin as she went to France to have an on-screen AND off-screen romance with middle-aged French singer Serg Gainsbourg in "Slogan". This movie was apparently the May-December quota film for Olivia Hussey, the teenage star of Zeffereli's "Romeo and Juliet". It's more believable than most because she's paired with the 30-ish Tom Bell, who's conceivably still youthful and handsome enough to attract the interest of a teenager. And Hussey's character is a very precocious fifteen-going-on-sixteen and from an upper social class. She's an aspiring actress and he's a married theatrical electrician with two kids and an elderly gambling-addict father.
This is one of the most realistic of the British realist films perhaps because nothing really melodramatic ever happens. Unfortunately, that's also makes it rather boring, aside from the excellent performances by leads Hussey and Bell, and to a lesser Judy Carnes as the Bell character's unsuspecting(?)wife. I suppose that might also make it MORE of a male fantasy in that it doesn't necessarily end in divorce, scandal, and a lengthy jail sentence, but there actually isn't much of a sexual element to this either as most of the physical romance occurs off screen. It's not a bad film by any means, but it's one of those films that just kind of is what it is.
