A Severed Head (1971)
Country: GB
Technical: col 98m
Director: Dick Clement
Cast: Lee Remick, Ian Holm, Richard Attenborough, Claire Bloom, Jennie Linden
Synopsis:
A wine buyer having an affair with an artist-lecturer is shocked to learn that his wife is having one with her psychiatrist. Adopting a demeanour of meek amenability, his life is thrown upside down when the psychiatrist's castrating harpy of a sister arrives in town and his own smooth operating brother gets involved.
Review:
Adapted by J.B. Priestley, of all people, from a novel by Iris Murdoch, this demented upper class comedy of manners is written at a neurotic pitch of improbability to draw end-of-the-pier performances from most of the cast, save Claire Bloom, who wisely sticks to a tactic of smouldering deadpan sexiness for the entire proceedings. Holm pitches it somewhere between Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter but just about comes through with his honour intact. Apparently it's all about how we endow love objects with totemic significance. Or something.
Country: GB
Technical: col 98m
Director: Dick Clement
Cast: Lee Remick, Ian Holm, Richard Attenborough, Claire Bloom, Jennie Linden
Synopsis:
A wine buyer having an affair with an artist-lecturer is shocked to learn that his wife is having one with her psychiatrist. Adopting a demeanour of meek amenability, his life is thrown upside down when the psychiatrist's castrating harpy of a sister arrives in town and his own smooth operating brother gets involved.
Review:
Adapted by J.B. Priestley, of all people, from a novel by Iris Murdoch, this demented upper class comedy of manners is written at a neurotic pitch of improbability to draw end-of-the-pier performances from most of the cast, save Claire Bloom, who wisely sticks to a tactic of smouldering deadpan sexiness for the entire proceedings. Holm pitches it somewhere between Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter but just about comes through with his honour intact. Apparently it's all about how we endow love objects with totemic significance. Or something.
Country: GB
Technical: col 98m
Director: Dick Clement
Cast: Lee Remick, Ian Holm, Richard Attenborough, Claire Bloom, Jennie Linden
Synopsis:
A wine buyer having an affair with an artist-lecturer is shocked to learn that his wife is having one with her psychiatrist. Adopting a demeanour of meek amenability, his life is thrown upside down when the psychiatrist's castrating harpy of a sister arrives in town and his own smooth operating brother gets involved.
Review:
Adapted by J.B. Priestley, of all people, from a novel by Iris Murdoch, this demented upper class comedy of manners is written at a neurotic pitch of improbability to draw end-of-the-pier performances from most of the cast, save Claire Bloom, who wisely sticks to a tactic of smouldering deadpan sexiness for the entire proceedings. Holm pitches it somewhere between Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter but just about comes through with his honour intact. Apparently it's all about how we endow love objects with totemic significance. Or something.