A hoary old man's rainy-day remembrance of a traumatic boyhood summer, which he spent in sumptuous English countryside, scampering conspiratorially between the majestic household of cool, blond aristocrats and the neighboring farmhouse tenanted by a sweaty, dark commoner. The polite conversation (by Harold Pinter, out of an L.P. Hartley novel) is spiked with nasty thorns and thistles; the setting-up of the milieu (Joseph Losey, director, and Gerry Fisher, cameraman) is effortless and assured; but the dramatic tone is rather overintensified by the all too obvious actors (Alan Bates, Edward Fox, Julie Christie, and especially, quivering and quaking, Margaret Leighton) and by the earsplitting music (Michel Legrand). (1971) — Duncan Shepherd
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