Live Now, Pay Later is a 1962 British black-and-white comedy-drama film starring Ian Hendry, June Ritchie and John Gregson, directed by Jay Lewis.[3] It was loosely based on the 1961 novel All on the Never-NeverbyJack Lindsay. However, the script was solely written by Jack Trevor Story, who subsequently published a novel called "Live Now, Pay Later" in 1963.[4]
The film focuses on the life of a salesman who habitually seduces his female customers in order to convince them to buy his products. He is secretly embezzling money from the sales, and has a side career as a blackmailer.
Unsavoury door-to-door salesman Albert Argyle's technique involves bedding his female customers in an attempt to seduce them to buy on credit. As well as being unfaithful to his pregnant girlfriend, the unrepentant Argyle is also cheating his boss out of profits, and trying his hand at a spot of blackmail.
A version of the opening titles song "Live Now, Pay Later" (Clive Westlake, Ruth Batchelor) was released in 1963 as a single by Doug Sheldon (Decca 45-F 11529).[5]
Variety considered the film to have "many amusing moments, but overall it is untidy and does not develop the personalities of some of the main characters sufficiently. Extraneous situations are dragged in without helping the plot development overmuch."[2]
Monthly Film Bulletin said: "It is the cheerful unpretentiousness of its social criticism which gives the film its rather endearing flavour. ... The unevenness in the acting and the perpetual uncertainty of mood indicates a lack of control in Jay Lewis's direction. Nevertheless his film is constantly entertaining, and it has both a conscience and a heart."[7]
Leslie Halliwell opined: "A satirical farce which lets fly in too many directions at once and has a cumulatively cheerless effect despite some funny moments."[8]
The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 5/5 stars, calling the film: "a remarkably cynical and revealing portrait of Britain shifting from postwar austerity into rampant consumerism and the Swinging Sixties. ... Hendry's character is appalling, yet he is also sympathetic since he's the only person who ever does anything in a society built on inertia and the sense of defeat that ony wartime victory can bring. "[9]
InHollywood, England: British Film Industry in the SixtiesAlexander Walker wrote: "The film's cynicism was total, its targets were ruthlessly demolished, and everything had the vigour of a cartoonist's world where the action is carried an instant beyond its naturalistic conclusion."[10]
