Harold meets the beautiful Zita, a stripper. Albert is landed for his son, until he announces that the pair plan to marry. Albert does everything he can to sabotage the relationship, even joining the pair on their honeymoon.I am stunned by so many of the negative reviews on this movie, for me the two Steptoe movies are the most successful films inspired by TV sitcoms.They kept our two lead characters completely in character, they didn't send the show up in the way that Rising Damp and Are You being served both did. It's a great mix of tragedy and comedy, for me comedy always works better when it's tinged with a bit of sadness and realism, it's why I've always been such a fan of One Foot in the Grave. The spite between the pair that we love throughout the TV series is brilliantly realised here, Harold desperate to escape, Albert desperate to keep hold of his son for his own reasons.Corbett and Bramble add their usual brilliance to their parts, Carolyn Seymour is just fabulous, so believable in her role, I firmly believe in that scene where he sees her and instantly falls in love with her.It's a great movie. 9/10

In the TV series, Steptoe and Son always played with the audiences empathy. Old man Steptoe was a horrible man, but this was redeemed by the ludicrousness of his acts. Harold was naive and pretentious but because he was a rag and bone man nobody took him seriously. In this film someone does take Harold seriously and Steptoe is generally just horrible. The actors play their roles with their usual gusto, but the underlying love between Steptoe & his son that sustained the TV series is replaced here by something far less wholesome and more akin to psychological and emotional abuse. Cliff Owen (Director) had either never seen the series, or in this instance was incapable of capturing the subtlety and nuance that great comedy depends upon. Every gag is wrung dry and instead of pathos you get squalor. The TV series is and will remain a great example of British comedy, this film is not.

"Women? They're all scrubbers...!" No, not a good translation; not at all! This lags behind the previous year's "Dad's Army", entirely missing the special, small-screen magic of the seminal television sitcom original, and failing to play interestingly at all with the big screen... you could just about say that this film well represents a Britain entering decline, and more precisely even than that, a *British film industry* entering decline. And that is hardly a recommendation, is it? To be an exemplar of saddening folly...All that remains after the subtlety of the TV original has been surgically stripped away, by Cliff Owen, Galton and Simpson are: endless, dilapidated musical cues, yawn, from the Ron Grainer theme... bolstered sentimentality (that shoddy, thick-eared ending... how much bolder does the second Steptoe film seem in comparison) an increased seediness - with director and writers seemingly detaching themselves completely - fully applicable to something like the 'misbegotten monstrosity' (yours truly on this site) from 1973, "The Mutations". There is a strangely botched, cut-adrift tone about the scene where Harold is beaten up in a rugby club, that I partly hate and recoil it (so far, as a friend intimated, from the mood of the TV series...), but this at least seems an original slant, and emblematic of tensions just rising to the boil in the Britain of 1972... There is, however, an implied prostitute, aye of a 'heart-of-gold' who turns loose woman-traitor 'pon poor auld 'Arold - and beyond-caricature writing of the 'class' element; not to mention, surprisingly misjudged performances from the usually redoubtable leads. Brambell and Corbett collude with the script, and indeed fail to cure it of an essential ham. What would Anthony Aloysius Hancock have made of it all...? I will merely concede that a few moments just about work - chiefly those where G & S play things a little more carefully and B & C touch tenderer nerves - and it is not on the whole an unwatchable affair. But, and oh, how this pains me to say it: it is tiresome, boring, both wilfully detached from reality and what made the TV series great, and also fully in tune with the lazy, tawdry, misogynist 'fuck it, that'll do...' actuality of much of what was allowed to pass for mainstream film-making in the Britain of the time.

This captures the heart and soul of the TV show.The two leads are so realistic that you could not really see them as anything other than a classic double act.a neat story even if the ending is predictable.but its stays true to character.some good genuine laughs.though you do feel for the younger Steptoe.