Chibnall has established that the film was shown on LWT in 1976 and 1980 "in a bowdlerised version" (which edited out Britt Ekland's phone sex scene) [76] and once on Westward Television and on Granada in August 1981, but it was not shown nationally and in its entirety until a post-watershed BBC broadcast in 1986. He thought the general stance of British critics "was to admire the film's power and professionalism while condemning its amorality and excessive violence". Michael Klinger and the MGM publicity spokesman dismissed the use of the location as mere coincidence; however, Hodges was aware of the significance of the house and chose it deliberately. The film finally opened for general release across the UK on 10 March 1971 and in the US on 18 March, where it was rated 'X' for violence and female nudity, meaning it was for adults only. Asked in 2006, Putzu could not remember his artistic rationale for painting the floral jacket, but said he was painting a lot of flowers in designs at that time.

She attracted Hodges' attention not just for her good looks but for her work on Alun Owen's television plays Stella and Doreen. The women in this book exist to be screwed, scorned, or beaten - AND, the woman had better look pretty damned good while she's being hit in the face. Suelen presagiar personajes intensos, cincelados con la navaja de cortar cuellos que todo buen matón lleva encima siempre, por si acaso.

The crucial decade from 1970 to 1980 just seems – and there is no other phrase that fits – like another country. A censored version was released in West Germany on 6 August 1971, with a running time nine minutes shorter than the original.

He’s not the kind of biographer to flourish some kind of glib reasoning for Lewis’s decline, forcing the man’s life into a single theory. In fact, most people who read the book after seeing the movie are surprised to learn it wasn’t set in Newcastle at all. He waited hours until the sun began setting to capture the overcast shadowy lighting seen in the film. The arrival of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent is depicted, along with the tensions created in the local community. Richard Weaver in Films and Filming praised the realism of the film, describing it as "crime at its most blatant", [89] [92] while George Melly writing in The Observer confessed to vicarious enjoyment of it, but admitted it was "like a bottle of neat gin swallowed before breakfast.

Jack joined initially the local thugs and escaped at the first occasion to London where he became an enforcer for the major league gangsters. Klinger was invited to view a first print of Peter Walker's Man of Violence (1969) and was unimpressed, telling the director "I'm going to make a gangster film, but it's going to cost a lot more than this and it's going to be better". Jack and Frank have been estranged for years, but Frank was still his little brother and Jack still carries very fond memories of the time they spent growing up together.

Lewis depicted Peter as a misogynistic homosexual in his novel; these elements were not emphasised in the film, although the character is flamboyant and camp. Shawn Levy of the Portland Oregonian gave an average review, saying that while "the film doesn't touch the original, it doesn't hit rock bottom, either. As a young man Bindon had been in and out of borstal, and spent most of his adult life associating with criminals, so he was ideally suited to play a gangland boss, despite being young, having intimate knowledge of that world.Wobble had long been a fan of the bassline of the track, saying in a 2004 interview with The Independent that "There are some bass lines that contain the whole mystery of creation within them".