Before she went into politics or public service, Glenda Jackson was one of Britain's finest film actresses. This film displays her talent despite having a supporting role in a stellar cast that includes Julie Christie as Kitty, the wife of a British Royal Captain who has lost his memory of the last 20 years, and Jenny played by American Ann-Margret in an almost unrecognizable role as the doting sister. Alan Bates plays the captain who suffers from memory loss triggered by the shell shock during World War I. Sir Ian Holm has a smaller role as the doctor treating him. You see familiar faces like Sheila Keith, Patsy Byrne, and Frank Finlay. You can't help but watch Glenda play a dowdy housewife and the first true love of the Captain but they came from different classes. It's not the greatest movie but it's good to see Glenda's amazing talent. She is still a fantastic actress, comedy or drama. She makes Margaret Grey into a likable character and you see why a regal captain fell in love with her.
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Sylviastel24 February 2007
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JohnDishwasher29 June 2020I just finished the novel today and watched this on YouTube and am only writing this to say it is amazingly faithful to West's novella. You rarely see a movie that stays so true to a book and then succeeds as a film as this one does.
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mjoyceh9 June 2021Much of this film is terrific, but it started too late into the plot, and then ended too abruptly.
The problem is that this film tried too hard to be faithful to the novel on which it is based. But books and film are entirely different modes of communication. What works in a novel does not always work on the screen. This film is a good example.
This film's message seems to be that insane people can be happier than sane ones, using the Alan Bates character as proof. Yet the film gives only 1 or 2 minutes to his pre-illness life, and only a few seconds to him supposedly being sane again. I say "supposedly" because all we see is a few seconds of him walking across a lawn. There is no evidence whatsoever that he is now unhappy again.
This film would have been much more effective if additional scenes had been added: e.g. A more extended pre-illness scene showing an unhappy Alan Bates; and then a new scene at the end showing him unhappy. These two scenes would have much more effectively bracketed the happier but insane part of his life. -
cmf12614 January 2004This is one of the most beautiful, and heartbreaking, films that I have ever seen. The story of a shell-shocked soldier who, in order to escape the horrors of the war in which he has been involved (WW I) retreats to some inner world of the past. He loses all sense of reality, and becomes entrenched in a time before his marriage, the loss of his child, and the pressures of adulthood. Played by the magnificent and tragically departed Alan Bates, the title character Captain Chris Baldry, takes refuge in a love that existed twenty years before, when he was a young man with his life in front of him. The object of his affection, Glenda Jackson, is now a middle aged woman, but he sees her with the eyes of love, and she is for him the youthful beauty with whom he fell in love decades ago. His wife, a brittle and uncaring Julie Christie, wants him to regain his sense of the present, because she misses her social status. His first love does not initially believe that he should be roused back to consciousness, because she wants him to remain in a happy, albeit unrealistic state. His cousin (played by an unusually good Ann-Margret), a woman who has loved him in secret since the days of their shared childhood, is in a middle place between the two, wanting him back, and yet appreciating the fact that his unawareness and his psychological trip backward in time is bringing him a sort of peace.
Ultimately, the women join forces and realize, with the help of a psychiatrist, that the man they love must be roused from his reverie. The final scene, in which he is brought face to face with reality, is wrenching and difficult, and Sir Alan is able to show with the straightening of his shoulders and the stiffness of his gait that he has returned, sadly, to the present. It is an unspeakably sad performance, of great beauty.
I was reminded, when watching this film, of another film which focused almost entirely on character as opposed to action: "Charly" a film based on the book "Flowers for Algernon" In that movie, which garnered an Academy Award as Best Actor for Cliff Robertson, depicted how an individual who has been moved into a different reality (a retarded man becomes, for a short while, intellectually gifted)can capture a few moments of happiness, which must be sacrificed when he returns to his prior state.
Similarly, the film 'Awakenings' with Robert De Niro tells the story of a man who languished in a coma for many years, and was allowed, through the use of an experimental drug, a few weeks of happiness, a few brief moments to experience life, before the veil of unconsciousness was once again drawn over him when the drugs stopped working.
These stories of people who find happiness in small, short snippets of time, are incredibly moving, and underscore the brevity of life, and the importance of living each moment to its fullest extent.
The Return of the Soldier is truly a tour de force, very sad, very beautiful, and incredibly well-acted. I would strongly recommend it to admirers of Alan Bates, and all those who want to be deeply engaged by a film. -
JuguAbraham8 October 2020Julie Christie plays a negative wealthy character Kitty (created by novelist Rebecca West) with aplomb. Christie's Kitty is stunningly beautiful and yet is so snooty and possessive of her husband (Alan Bates). Glenda Jackson plays the intelligent, dowdy middleclass, caring, married woman who is the contrasting lover of Kittie's husband's past. Ms West cleverly designed the two characters to have lost a child each, both at the age of five. Both ladies are traumatized equally. However, I found Ann-Margaret, playing Kitty's sister-in-law Jenny, to be better than the other two ladies. Apart from the all round notable performances of all the characters, the casting of the main characters and the camerawork of Stephen Goldbatt (was director Alan Bridges also a contributor to the intelligent camera placing?) were notable. Not a great work, this film, but a delight to watch all the actors and actresses emote in their varied roles.
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henry8-34 May 2022Chris Baldry (Alan Bates) returns from WWI with shell shock and his memory in tatters. His wife, Julie Christie unable to accept the situation is desperate to return to the rigid high society world she loves so much. Baldry though cannot remember his wife, but instead recalls his love from 20 years before with Glenda Jackson, who visits him and enables him to find happiness again.
Touching and beautifully acted by a fabulous cast, it's impossible to pinpoint any particular performance as they're all extremely impressive. It's a gentle tale with a perfect ending where you realise the dilemma of curing Bates so he can return to normality or leaving him young at heart and happy, but essentially hiding from his true life. -
trpdean6 February 2005This is superb - the acting wonderful, sets, clothes, music - but most of all the story itself.
I am amazed there aren't more reviews of this movie - certainly one of the best of the 1980s.
It's also a wonderful movie to see in tandem with the great "Random Harvest" which has much the same opening crisis
-- a middle aged, unknown English W.W.I officer is in a hospital toward the close of the war, suffering from shell shock and complete amnesia without any idea of his name, origin, or anywhere he belongs - he proves to be a very wealthy established man - when he "recovers", he will not remember the years before the war --
But there the movies' resemblances end.
My warmest thanks to all who participated in the movie - particularly the actors Ian Holm, Alan Bates, Ann Margret (what a great and surprising casting choice), Glenda Jackson, Julie Christie.
This one stays with you forever. -
jjnxn-13 December 2013Lyrical, leisurely paced drama enacted by giants of the acting world. For those who have no patience for a story that plays out in measured parts this film is not for you, but if you are willing to allow a film to reveal itself slowly you'll be richly rewarded. All four leads are award worthy although all went unacknowledged in that year's honors.
Alan Bates offers up a beautifully controlled performance as Chris Baldry a man who has lost his identity in the war. Working in a childish almost trance like state to reconnect with the part of his life that to him is immediate but is actually long in the past his vulnerable yearning is deeply touching. He is simply great.
Equally magnificent are his three leading ladies, all the more so for them since all three are cast against their established images.
Ann-Margret is close to unrecognizable as Bates cousin the sedate, caring Jenny. Hers is the smallest of the three woman's roles but buried under a dark wig with no makeup she still manages to make an impact and hold her own against the powerhouse trio who drive the film.
Glenda Jackson subsumes her normal tough often strident personality into the quiet, gentle lower class Margaret Grey who the searching Chris' remembers as his great love. Forsaking the grand gestures that often mark her work as queens and countesses she is entirely convincing as the working class housewife transformed back to a sort of beauty by the remembrance of a long ago love.
Julie Christie is perhaps most impressive as the haughty, closed in Kitty, the amnesiac Chris' forgotten wife. Always secure in her position and place in the world up until the moment of Chris' return she conveys Kitty's newfound uncertainty in small darted glances and the brittle armor her upbringing has provided to protect her from the vagaries of a world from which she has always been removed. There is a scene played mostly in profile at a window and with minimal dialog in which she imparts so many emotions in a short period of time it's takes the breath away. Not just some of the best acting she's ever done but some of the best ever put on screen.
Aside from the main quartet the only role of any substance is essayed by Ian Holm as the therapist trying to lead Chris back through the mists of his puzzlement. He is fine as usual but he is rather sidelined by the acting fireworks of the main four.
Richly appointed and lovingly shot this is for fans of great acting and adult storytelling. -
moonspinner5530 December 2007Send him back! An ungodly bore from the UK and director Alan Bridges stars Alan Bates as an Army captain returning home from duty in World War I with his memory impaired (probably not an overused story function in 1918 when Rebecca West published her novel, but now a self-defeating cliché). Seems Bates remembers old flame Glenda Jackson but not current wife Julie Christie, which should be enough to set off some emotional sparks. Instead, this chilly adaptation by screenwriter Hugh Whitemore is simply a star-studded non-starter. There are less than a handful of strong scenes (it picks up whenever Jackson is around), Bridges' pacing is unrelievedly sluggish, and the dulled-out color from cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt is enervating. "Soldier" sat on the shelf for three years ("due to legal complications") and is best left forgotten. One BAFTA nomination: for Frank Finlay as Best Supporting Actor. *1/2 from ****
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catmantu1 August 2006With the advent of the IMDb, this overlooked movie can now find an interested audience. Why? Because users here who do a search on two-time Academy Award winner Glenda Jackson can find 'The Return of The Soldier' among her credits. So can those checking out Oscar winner Julie Christie. Fans of Ann-Margret can give the title a click, as will those looking into the career of the great Alan Bates. Not to mention the added bonus of a movie with supporting heavyweights Ian Holm and Frank Finlay. Any movie with so many notables in it is rewarded by the IMDb, given all the cross-referencing that goes on here. So, why isn't this movie out on DVD? Don't the Producers realize the Internet Movie Database is a marketing gift for such a film? And 'The Return of The Soldier' is definitely a gem waiting to be discovered. Get with it, people.
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Piafredux2 June 2006The cliché of the shell-shocked soldier home from the war is here given dull treatment. Pity a splendid cast, acting to the limits of their high talents, can't redeem 'The Return of the Soldier' from its stiff-collared inability to move the viewer to emotional involvement. Best moments, as another reviewer noted, come when Glenda Jackson is on screen; but even Jackson's crackling good cinematic power can't pull this film's chestnuts from its cold, never warmed hearth. Ann-Margret, she of sex-kitten repute and too often accused of lacking acting ability, finds her actual and rather profound abilities wasted here - despite her speaking with a nigh-flawless Middlesex accent. The hackneyed score, redolent of many lackluster TV miniseries' slathered-on saccharine emotionalism, is at irritating odds with the emotional remoteness of the script, blocking, and overbaked formalism of the direction; except for its score and corseted script and direction, 'The Return of the Soldier' has all the right bits but it fails to make them work together.
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robert-temple-112 October 2011Everything about this film is brilliant, and it is one of the finest films to come out of England in the 1980s. Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, and Julie Christie, all give some of the most glowing and inspired performances of their entire careers. The film is based upon a haunting novel by Rebecca West (undoubtedly based on real situations she had encountered when she was young), with an excellent script by Hugh Whitemore. The film's evocative atmosphere is immensely powerful, aided greatly by the excellent musical score by Richard Rodney Bennett, which brings out the flavour of the film as salt, garlic and rosemary bring out the flavour of roast lamb. The editing is particularly good, by Laurence Méry-Clark. Ian Holm, Frank Finlay, and Jeremy Kemp are all very good in their supporting roles, which are relatively small. A surprise is Ann-Margret as Cousin Jenny, a major role. For a good-time American girl involved with the Rat Pack in Las Vegas, to play a repressed English spinster of 1918 to perfection was no mean achievement, and shows she was a real actress. Such versatility, and it is a pity she did not do more of that. The direction by Alan Bridges is exquisitely sensitive and nearly perfect. His other major achievements were directing THE HIRELING (1973, see my review), and THE SHOOTING PARTY (1985). He ceased working as long ago as 1990. He was a truly inspired director, most of whose output was of quality television which is not available to see today. This tragic tale concerns an English soldier, Captain Baldry (Alan Bates), who has returned from the First War with shell shock. He cannot remember the last twenty years of his life. Such cases did occur, and all this is not just made up. Julie Christie (who in real life is a sweetie) plays the horribly snobbish, vain, unfeeling wife of Bates who takes personal offence that he cannot remember her and does not find her attractive. She has little concern for his welfare or mental heath but keeps trying to force herself and his former life back on him, inviting neighbours to dinner the night after he returns home, with the opposite results to what she intended, of course. Her insensitivity to others is exceeded only by her self love. Bates under-plays his role, which makes it all the more effective. He cannot believe the vacuity of his former existence, and after asking Christie to tell him what their life together had been like and what they used to do all day, he says pathetically: 'Is that all?' They live in a grand house in the country and are exceedingly rich, with their house full of servants. All he can think of is his first great love, when he was twenty, a girl named Margaret (Glenda Jackson). She is found and meets him again after twenty years. She is married, as he is, and we eventually learn that each has a lost a child of the same age in the same year. In a wonderful and poignant scene with Cousin Jenny, Jackson says mournfully of the two lost children: 'It's as if each had only half a life.' Jackson is still in love with Bates and had never ceased to be. They lost touch because of circumstances when young, and now their love has come back. Bates keeps telling her he loves her, and acts like a boy of twenty again when he is with her. Christie seethes with rage but can do nothing, as all her attempts to insult Jackson are water off a duck's back, and merely drive her herself further into irrelevance. Cousin Jenny is wholly in sympathy with Bates but is exposed as hopelessly ineffectual. She lives a wan existence in the huge household, as a family retainer with no future of her own. The subtlety with which all this is enacted and portrayed is what could be called 'the best of English tact'. Every touch is delicate, countless nuances are allowed to drift in the enchanted air of the isolated domain of the great house. Everyone dresses for dinner, and having to put on white tie every evening to come down to dine with one's wife and cousin is shown for the empty ritual it is, accepted, however, as part of a tradition which cannot be openly questioned. After all, in that long-vanished society, formality was the badge of belonging, and if you did not wear your white tie to private dinners with your own wife at home you were no longer 'one of us'. With his recent memory erased, Bates comes perilously close to experiencing exclusion from polite society because he cannot remember anyone and, through his innocence acquired courtesy of an enemy shell against his head, dares to question what he never dared to examine before. As his psychiatrist Ian Holm says, bringing someone like that back to 'normality' might merely mean bringing him back to unhappiness. Without having read the original novel, I can sense beneath the surface of this story a savage attack on the manners and mores of the privileged elite of the time. Presumably Rebecca West was not the girlfriend of socialist H. G. Wells for nothing, and they would have shared an agenda of attacking the root of privilege. Here this is done with immense but devastating subtlety through what in the end becomes a fable thrown like one of the German bombs against the fortress of the elite, as epitomised by the odious character of the voraciously selfish and spoilt Julie Christie. By contrast, Jackson leads a relatively impoverished life in Wealdstone (a location viciously mocked by Christie), married to a boring man, wrapped up in her baking and housework. Appallingly dressed, Christie calls her 'the dowd'. But Bates loves her madly, and ignores Christie. This film will remain a genuine and enduring classic.
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Icons7628 April 2012This expensive, mainstream UK/US co-production,backed and distributed by 20th Century Fox, was at its Premiere at the Cannes Film Festival,shamelessly overlooked! They called it a well made,TV mini-series look-a-like, overly coated with thick layers of saccharine wanna be romantic drama. Since,after such poor reviews,despite the huge international Cast,and its enchanted settings, this wonderful,delicate,yet very poignant adaptation of one of Rebecca West's more controversial novels,ever, an extremely beautifully produced, extraordinarily acted moving,psychological period story,was cursed by bad Distributions worldwide, and I finally got to see it when i was about 15, in NYC in 1984, where, again, despite a fine launch,the movie was yet very quickly dismissed by main critics. I always loved Julie Christie and Glenda Jackson,and I remember almost forcing my mother to the Theater in one late spring,chilly rainy afternoon! I was expecting a true misfire and was just interested to see the Stars, whom, as we all know too well, have chosen way too many years ago, not to work very often (however Christie had huge and rightly raved come back's in the 1990's on stage or in great films like Universal's "Dragonheart",and as the lead Queen Gertrude in the stellar, big studio rendition of Kenneth Branagh's superb "Hamlet",followed by a Best Actress Oscar nominations and Best Actress Indy Spirit Awards Winner for her mesmerizing turn in Robert Altman's production of Alan Rudolph's "Afterglow" in 1998, and then has worked in very interesting films like Hal Hartley's also underrated "No such thing" in 2001,played Brad Pitt's mother in "Troy"(2004),was excellent in the wonderfully touching,Awards winning "Finding Neverland"(2005) and had a personal triumph, as Fiona,the still beautiful,Alzhaimer's disease affected lady who forgets her husband in Sarah Polley's outstanding Awards winner "Away from Her" in 2007,while she'll be just paired opposite Robert Redford's in the much awaited big budget political thriller "The Company you keep" due out next Awards Season! And forgive me for all this extra info on Christie, but It just excites me,that we are at least be able to see her, and forever haunting and gorgeous in very selected films, at least, while,Jackson has unfortunately left the scenes,apparently for good,in the late 1980's!). Well, once the tail credits of "The Return of the Soldier" were rolling, I noticed tears on my mother's eyes, and I was like electrified. While i can understand that today,still remaining a great solid film, has lost all that mystery and unique impeccable period reconstruction, and cinematography's merits, due to the almost overwhelming abundance of period romantic drama's that followed in the 1990's, and not just from Merchant-Ivory's, but also from many others, and not always so exceptional, as they were then reviewed, you have to understand that back then,i guess in early 1984, a so classic structured film,shot with such an innovative use, of flashbacks,haunting,dark and saturated cinematography,embracing some of the loveliest possible tones of a canvas,its unique editing and also formidable scoring, were not so common! I actually truly believe that the Cult that this film has developed (mostly in Europe) has certainly inspired all those numerous British/US co-productions that became instead so wildly popular in the 1990's and,again, not all of them, as good! Mother and I were stunned, by the film, its simple yet extremely moving twist at the end, a few very dramatic revelations, just staged with almost strict attention to measure, and,of course,besides the extremely sensitive,refined work from extremely focused director Alan Bridges (here at his very,very best,both with the sophisticated,yet deeply haunting narration,to the strong-back then- lovely and personal visual choices), we were delighted by the work of all the cast: a deeply penetrating performance from Jackson,a role that only Christie's natural Iconic talent could have made even sympathetic at the end, and certainly so gorgeous to look at, an extremely controlled,measured Alan Bates,here really offering almost a new face to his whole career, and the surprise of watching adorable, Ann-Margret, without make up and playing flawlessly, against type, the role of shy, sweet,if repressed and lonely, relative,kept in the wealth of her house by Kitty(Christie),almost more like a servant,or a useful house guest, than a real close and devoted relative. I can only say that,immediately back then, we sent many people,who were not truly convinced about going to a Theater to watch this excellent movie,always calling us back to thank us for the pitch or even so emotionally touched to want to come over over tea to discuss it! And throughout the years, I always heard incredible things about it,from almost anyone's with a certain sensibility for a superior,more eloquent and artistic type of filmmaking! And i can only still highly recommend it to most people: but please,just make sure to get a greater DVD widescreen copy, and not,another TV formatted, and brutally cut for commercials copy: this is a movie, rich of its own and unique fascinating atmosphere, and like a painting, should be appreciated at its best and most respectful vision, and not in some pan and scan TV version! Enjoy.
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johnmclain393 January 2015I was drawn to this film because of the cast and the fact that it was a Rebecca West story. After viewing the film I found myself so overwhelmed by it that I had to return to the theater the next day to see it again. In the second viewing I was able to truly "watch" the film. Alan Bridges attention to detail was astounding, as when Jenny dropped a comb onto the white fur rug in the window area of Kitty's bedroom as she saw Margaret approaching their house. When Margaret sat in the foyer waiting and gently touched a small figurine of a little boy with her loving finger. All one needed to know about the character of Margaret Allington was revealed. One tends to overlook the work of Ann-Margaret among this seasoned,professional cast. Her connection with Chris Baldry was completely believable,poignant and ultimately heart breaking. Excellent work. In a stroke of genius Bridges set the deciding scene in which Margaret tells Chris of his dead son (and is ultimately restored to a present day state of mind) far away from our viewing eyes. We cannot see the expression on Chris' face as he hears the news. We can only see his physical reaction to the tragic news and then finally Margaret standing a minute alone as he "returns" to the house before she turns and walks away. A brilliant handling of arguably the most important scene in the film. Alan Bridges was among the greatest of directors.
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malcolmgsw15 August 2022When I saw the cast for this film I had great expectations. However these were not fulfilled. Everything seemed such a cliche and better done in other films. Ot was directed at a snails pace The producers were Brent Walker better known for Joan Collins sex films.
The fact that this film sat on the shelf for 3 years,for whatever reason,says a lot about distributors faith in it. -
mike-92525 July 2007just saw this exquisite 1982 movie Return of the Soldier, based on Rebecca West's novel. Its about a shell-shocked fortyish Captain who doesn't even tell his wife he has returned to British soil, but remains in a hospital in London. He's lost his memory and is a boy again, with a lingering yen for the lower class sweetheart he pursued 25 years earlier. Its a delicate story. He is lingering in his boyhood, while the reader discovers his wife is an unbearable, aspiring socialite who wants him to resume his place in society. Living with them is his cousin Jenny, who loved Chris Baldry the soldier, when they were growing up as playmates, but has settled into spinsterhood. The lower class woman, played by Glenda Jackson, is Margaret Gray. It is SHE who is notified that Chris is back in England. Chris' wife Kitty is shocked when Mrs. Gray comes to tell her that Chris is in a hospital in London. Kitty (Julie Christie) is vacuous and snobbish. Why, she asks herself, was this other woman sent a telegraph about Chris rather than her? Chris has forgotten totally about Kitty. He wants to renew his relationship with Margaret. The now married Margaret is reluctant to meet him, but then does and continues to meet with him. There is a psychiatrist (Ian Holm) who warns Kitty and Jenny that Chris' temporary happiness with Margaret will disappear if he 'cures' him. Jenny realizes how empty Kitty is for Chris and forms a secret loving alliance through Margaret. They both are in love with him. Jenny wants to help. Late in the film Kitty reveals that Chris and she had a boy who died five years ago. Telling Chris this, weighs the Shrink, will certainly restore him to 'normal.' But is this a good idea? Chris, barely aware that he and Kitty were ever married, is unaware of his child and the child's death. The psychiatrist, just learning of the child, believes such knowledge will restore Chris. Jenny and Margaret have Chris all to themselves because Kitty believes he is faking and refuses to accept Chris's illness in reverting to his youth in his forties. The film leaves her mostly out of consideration concerning whats to be done with Chris.
But Jenny and Margaret, in the child's perfectly maintained bedroom- with Kitty too in the novel, but not in the screenplay- discuss what they believe should be done about Chris from their separate perspectives. Margaret is the critical one here, because, though married, she has half fallen in love with Chris again. Jenny's social stature, Jenny believes, will be threatened if Chris does not right himself. She does not reveal this to Margaret, however. Margaret decides, looking ahead, that Chris cannot maintain his fantasy over time, but must return to something like a real life. While Kitty and Jenny look on from the window of the house, Margaret approaches Chris outside and tells him of his lost son. The buoyant war victim's head sinks, his shoulders slump, he looks away. He walks dejectedly toward the house. Fin
I read some criticism of this first novel of Rebecca West. The novel was written something after the first war. The movie is never quite clear who Jenny is, his cousin or his sister. It would be more rousing if she were his sister, of course. The criticism doesn't make it clear either. I'm sure West in her novel, makes sure Jenny is her cousin, not her sister. West is no Henry Miller nor an Anais Nin, whose book Incest (about her relationship with her father as an adult to get even with him for molesting her as a child) I considered reading, but then decided against. Rebecca the author has a need to restore Chris too. She too has outposts in her head for the Society her novel excoriates first but finally embraces once more. -
ducdebrabant27 August 2004It's a perfect film, and Ann-Margret with little or no makeup, mousy brown hair and a -- to my ears -- perfect British accent might have been totally unrecognizable if I hadn't already known she was in the cast. I can't say I was totally surprised at how good she was, since I have liked all her performances since Carnal Knowledge (I could just weep over all the wasted years and crummy movies preceding it), but the way she held her own as an Englishwoman with the royalty of the British screen was pretty impressive.
Bates is utterly heartbreaking and Jackson is quite wonderful. She is at, almost, her least physically attractive, which adds to the poignancy. Christie on the contrary, as a selfish and shallow beauty, really IS a beauty in the film, still, which adds to the interest. She is being overlooked in favor of Jackson, to whom the years have not been kind. -
speedo5812 March 2010This movie has been poorly received and badly reviewed. The book by Rebecca West was written in 1918, soon after WWI, when shell shock and trauma-induced amnesia were not clichés, as the reviewers call it many books and movies later. It is difficult to go back in time and live, as the characters lived, the realities of the time: the war and the horror of the experience of the first war to use lethal gas, the British class system the wife thought all-important, the hopeless spinster, and the lover from the past still seen with the eyes of love being as young and as beautiful as she was 20 years ago.
Alan Bates as the amnesiac soldier who "will die" if he isn't allowed to see Margaret, the girl of his youthful dreams, builds on the devotion his character showed in "Far From the Madding Crowd". Having seen that performance, it is possible to sense his strong romantic attachment to the girl who didn't live up to the family's and society's expectations. Margaret says, "We quarreled, and as you rowed away, you turned your face away from me." So we know that the breakup was something that he instigated, that it brought him shame, but that he forgot the shame in his memory of his time with Margaret. I haven't seen all his films, but in the ones I've seen, he imparts a strong masculinity, which shines through even in this role as the disabled soldier.
I didn't even recognize Ann-Margaret at first and feel that her performance has been underrated. Not having read the book, I wondered whether the child who died was the result of acting on a borderline incestuous feeling between Jenny and Chris, though Jenny does state that she "is a cousin". The way Kitty keeps Jenny in the nursery in the hair-drying scene, the fact that Kitty says she always dries her hair in that room seems more a way for Kitty to keep the coals of anger hot than the orientation of the room to the sun, or sentiment about a lost child, and the statement she made that she wished Chris hadn't felt it necessary to preserve the room exactly as it was when the child was alive made her seem uncaring toward the memory of the child. Also, Jenny is shown as living in the house in a subservient role, as high society would have done to a fallen member at the time.
Having recently been the recipient of the intense fantasy of a lover (non-sexualin keeping with the mores of the time) from 50 years ago, I couldrelate to Margaret's and her husband's dilemma. I, too, was cast aside because I wasn't good enough for his family, and upon his rediscovery of me via the internet, I was burdened with helping him deal with his still very horrifying Vietnam experiences and a marriage to a woman above his class whom he didn't believe he loved. My husband, like Margaret's was very understanding, but the strain was very real. The lover was finally able to reconcile his real-life situation with his fantasy of loving only me.
I thought that it was a good decision to show very little of the reliving of the war experience that was happening in Chris's mind. I thought of "Mrs. Dalloway" with the WWI soldier who acts out very violent memories and commits suicide versus Chris's joy in his fantasy of Margaret. In contrast, the actiona of the soldier in "Mrs. Dalloway" seems overwrought.
Showing that the psychiatrist understood very little of what was happening to Chris underlines what a major problem the whole group faced. Everyone seems to get their life back, but was it the right choice? -
clanciai29 April 2023This is actually a film of understatements. The feelings and emotions are unbearably great and are never given any vent, but like a sleeping volcano they keep boiling underneath demanding a release sooner or later. The question is whether they are ever released. When Glenda Jackson finally asks Alan Bates' wife and doctor and sister to just let him be in his second childhood happiness, she is asking for the impossible and is well aware of it, and yet, we see nothing of the results of it. The meetings between her and Alan Bates are the most crucial and important scenes in the film, and yet we are kept out of their intimacy, and they both deny any existence of it. "How was your meeting?" after not having seen each other for twenty years, his wife Julie Christie asks, and he just answers, "We just talked," as of something trivial. But this constant chain of understatements are actually the strength and force of the film, communicating so much more than just the real action, and when Alan Bates finally is released from his happy ignorance, we never even get a glimpse of any consequence of it. We just have to guess and figure out how their lives would continue, probably returning completely to ordinary routines. Ann-Margret is surprisingly good as the sister, and the finest scene is perhaps when she and Glenda Jackson finally find and understand each other in mutual trust - in silence. It's a great film of an inextricable problem of mentality after too many shocks, both of the war and of personal tragedies, and doctor Anderson (Ian Holm) actually sums its all up when he says, "ignoring and forgetting pain does not cure it", a wound has to bleed in order to heal.
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Alan Bates is shellshocked Chris Baldry who has no memory of his wife Julie Christie but does remember his love for Glenda Jackson. In order to cure him Glenda is invited to the house. She and Baldry reignite their flame. Ann-Margarite is terrific as Jenny, Chris Baldry's cousin. Frank Finlay is Jackson's husband who says to do whatever she wants to do. If I say more, It would spoil the plot. Needless to say Crristie, Jackson, and Ann-Margaret are worth going anywhere to view. Add Alan Bates to that threesome, and there is magic.
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Kirpianuscus24 April 2017first, for the story who seems be a poem about vulnerabilities. than, for admirable performances. and for the great science of detail and for the lights who become second skin for each actor. a film about management of past. soft, nostalgic, seductive, bitter. about the war between two women for a man. a film in which each character is more than a presence but word from the experiences of the viewer. a special film. for the atmosphere and for the great art. for landscapes like translations of the states of the characters and for remarkable Glenda Jackson. for the science of exploration the nuances who define characters and impose each of them as the hero. a film who propose the dreamed Eangland from a lost age.