Two sisters, one poor, one rich, fight for custody of their dead sister's son. The lush and rather decorative visual style, with a lot of foreground activity from flowers, leaves, smoke, garden trellises, stone balusters, and so forth, and a lot of shallow focus to mash either foreground or background into a formless multicolored pulp, marks the movie straight off as the most commercial sort of soap opera. And it would be little trouble, as a matter of fact, to imagine it as a vehicle for Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, let's say, in their Warner Brothers heyday. (The time-setting of the story, adapted from a novel by Sumner Locke Elliott, is more or less in that same period, although the style, admittedly, is more in the Cinemascope and Technicolor mode of the 1950s.) But a soapy sort of slickness does not preclude subtlety, and the proper relationship here is not to be expressed as "slick but subtle," as if the subtlety has had to hack through or scale over the slickness. Rather it should be "slick and subtle," with the two qualities co-existing quite comfortably and even co-operatively. It is not in the nature of slickness to put up any resistance. Wendy Hughes, Robyn Nevin, Nicholas Gledhill; directed by Carl Schultz. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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