He mocks her getting her nose fixed. He grabs cherries out of her overstuffed refrigerator and tosses them out into the toilet. Furious, he refuses to let her pampered little sister Julie win at a game, an unspoken Patimkin rule. In truth, he doesn’t really see Brenda. When he meets her at the train station, he remarks that she doesn’t look like Brenda to him. There’s always a sense of their getting to know each other, even after all their time together, and there’s always something standing in the way of their happiness, which is, of course, each other. Brenda’s trying to get back at her mother, whom she thinks hates her—and what better way than by choosing an unsuitable boy? Smug and self-righteous and disapproving of her family’s excesses, Neil still can’t help himself from loving what he disapproves of. He’s desperate to improve his own lowly status, and at times, it seems as though he’s using Brenda to do it.
Neil’s humble Bronx background may mirror that of Brenda’s crass but sweet father (Jack Klugman), but his lack of ambition and passivity represents everything her upwardly-mobile family (they've only recently struck it rich through Mr. Patimkin’s plumbing-fixture business) is trying to leave behind them.
Their romance is out of the question so far as Brenda's suburbanite parents are concerned, so Neil and Brenda rendezvous in some of the sleaziest motels ever seen in a 1960s film (and that assessment includes The Bates Motel).