Alan Bates is brought back from the French trenches to his baronial estate, unable to remember anything of the past twenty years. That includes his wife, Julie Christie, but not his lifelong adoring cousin, Ann-Margret. He thinks he is still in love with the old flame of his youth, Glenda Jackson, but she is now married, poor, and, in the expression of his wife, "a dowd." These elements, plus the dead child's playroom kept "exactly as it was," are those of the Gothic romance novel. The actual novel on which the movie is based was written by Rebecca West in 1918, and its academic Freudianism is hardly more believable, hardly less contrived. But this only becomes really bothersome at the slam-bang therapeutic end. Before then, the detailed sense of place, of weather, of time of day, maintains an acceptable level of reality. Directed by Alan Bridges. (1982) — Duncan Shepherd
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