Love Thy Neighbour

Eddie Booth and Bill Reynolds are the kind of nextdoor neighbors who turn every small irritation into a full blown argument, trading insults over trivial slights while their wives, Joan and Barbie, stay on friendly terms. When a local "love-thy-neighbor" competition offers a prize, the two couples decide they can win, even if it means pretending to be more neighborly than they are. The film follows their increasingly silly attempts to outdo one another with staged goodwill, misunderstandings, and comic schemes, keeping the focus on domestic squabbles and the gulf between public manners and private grudges.

Directed by John Robins, the movie adapts the popular sitcom created by Vince Powell and Harry Driver, bringing the television characters to the big screen. Jack Smethurst and Rudolph Walker reprise their roles as Eddie and Bill, joined by Nina Baden-Semper, Kate Williams, and Bill Fraser in supporting parts.

As a theatrical spin-off of a hit TV show, the film aimed to cash in on the sitcoms audience, and it performed modestly at the box office in the UK. It wasn't a blockbuster, but it found an audience among viewers already familiar with the television series and its humor.

Because it mirrors the sitcom's frank, often awkward approach to race and neighborhood rivalry, the movie has stayed in conversations about 1970s British comedy. Critics and scholars reference it when discussing how humor handled social tensions in that era, and it functions today as a period piece that shows what mainstream comedy accepted and questioned at the time.

Reception was mixed, with viewers giving it a middling vote average of 6.2 out of 10 based on available votes, and critics divided over whether the jokes landed or felt dated. The film leans on themes of hypocrisy, pride, and small-town rivalry, using broad comic setups to reveal how people perform civility while nursing grudges. It's comic and sometimes uncomfortable, shaped by its television roots and the attitudes of its moment.