Odd choice of project for Randal Kleiser (Grease, Blue Lagoon, Big Top Pee-Wee), an adaptation of a very adult, very British novel about a heterosexual hairdresser still a virgin at thirty-one (and with nothing really "wrong" with him). The novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, has been allowed to write the script herself, bringing along large chunks of good dialogue, but rather too much interior talk to transplant it successfully from page to screen. (Kleiser helps but little with that.) It all seems to have lost its luster, and yet glimmerings of its sharp observation and gentle touchingness survive. And the cast is excellent, with top honors to Jesse Birdsall in the difficult main role, Jane Horrocks as an unwed mother who knows about life but wants to know about "art" as well, and Lynn Redgrave as a rich and lonely lady who faces the world in a red-wig-and-lensless-glasses disguise. Redgrave, in addition, earns a Medal of Valor for taking on a character to whom someone says, "I thought you might be a man in drag," and for taking off her clothes to reveal a sexual being well outside the imaginings of men's magazines. With Helena Bonham Carter, Peter Cook, and John Gielgud. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.