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The film's overall effect is caricature, and some of the fault is in the acting. Richard Burton turns Jimmy into a seething, snarling Elizabethan villain who seems on the point of forgetting himself and spewing out the speech of Shakespeare's Edmund: "Why bastard? Wherefore base?" The screen adaptation also cuts important bits of the play, e.g., Jimmy's illuminating complaint that "there aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fashioned grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New nothing-very-much-thank-you."
"Look Back in Anger is the best young play of its decade," wrote London Critic Kenneth Tynan in 1956. Others agreed, perhaps seeing more in what the play called to mind than in what it actually said. On the screen, at least, it suffers from imprecision: as Jimmy's troubles fester, Playwright Osborne never seems to know quite where to probe for the core of the boil, often strikes wildly at life itself, implicitly blaming society and government for failings that could only originate in the soul. Look Back in Anger might have been a sounder achievement if Jimmy were just healthy enough to arouse more fear, less pity.