Film

Up the Junction

Name: Up the Junction
Genre: Drama
Released: 1968
Cast: Suzy Kendall, Dennis Waterman, Maureen Lipman, Adrienne Posta, Liz Fraser

Other titles called Up the Junction: the 1965 film.

Social drama

A young woman abandons her privileged life for a grimy South London flat, discovering a world of working-class women navigating love, abortion, and survival with blackly comic resilience. Raw and unflinching, it captures a specific moment—1968—when class and gender collided with particular force. For anyone drawn to social realism with teeth and a refusal to sentimentalize poverty.

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Poor Cow1967

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Saturday Night and Sunday Morning1960

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Saturday Night and Sunday Morning poster

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

I've Heard the Mermaids Singing1987

Both documents marginal lives (working-class women, queer working-class woman) with genuine affection and without condescension. Both refuse to punish their characters for existing outside the mainstream.

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Cathy Come Home1966

A couple's slide into homelessness, shot like a documentary, devastating in its ordinariness. Loach again—this Kathy Bates role (well, similar idea) made British audiences actually angry at the state.

But Deliberately shapeless and punishing. Designed to make you uncomfortable, and it succeeds completely.

A Taste of Honey1961

A young woman in Manchester, pregnant and alone, finds an unexpected tenderness with a gay art student. Funny, sad, strange—it moves between registers like real life does, and treats its characters with genuine grace.

But Dated slang and attitudes. The accommodation of homosexuality, while radical, reads differently now.

This Is England2007

A boy joins a skinhead gang in the 1980s; Shane Meadows traces how belonging curdles into something uglier. Contemporary but captures the same working-class texture and the seduction of tribe.

But Brutal and occasionally exploitative. The violence isn't background—it's the point, which some find exhausting.

Mona Lisa1986

A man released from prison becomes a taxi driver for a sex worker; Neil Jordan finds noir in London's margins. Stylish, funny, and genuinely strange—a portrait of connection across damage.

But Shifts tone unpredictably. Some sequences feel like they belong in a different film; that's intentional, but it won't work for everyone.

In the Mood for Love2000

Two neighbours in 1960s Hong Kong discover their spouses are having an affair. Wong Kar-wai, all colour and composition and longing—utterly different from Up the Junction but identical in its hunger for class texture and human detail.

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Fish Tank2009

A violent, talented girl in East London dreams of joining a dance crew. Andrea Arnold's cinema is raw and sensory—she watches working-class life without flinching or explaining it away.

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