THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER (1982)

Writer Hugh Whitemore & director Alan Bridges’ film of Rebecca West’s WWI novel, her sole feature adaptation, tends to be snubbed as an also-ran Merchant/Ivory British upper-crust period piece.  Perhaps that’s a good thing, its leaner, less stuffy, slightly abstract narrative leading us thru a quietly heartbreaking story without some inferred docent pointing out what we should be looking at.*  In any event, the acting of the six leads alone makes it a must.  Alan Bates is the shell-shocked soldier come home with a twenty-year memory loss.  He knows the old family estate and his cousin Ann-Margaret (working in a believable Mid-Atlantic accent), but not Julie Christie, his painfully beautiful, society-oriented wife.  Instead, his mind harks back to the rather plain girl he loved & lost: Glenda Jackson, now grown, aged, childless and quietly married to Frank Finlay.  Christie’s lack of sympathy, refusal to understand and willful irritation at Bates’ medical condition unfathomably cruel, the root of her problem not a loss of affection or even the possibility of a rekindled affair, but stemming from a sense of embarrassment (even outrage) to see Bates involved with a woman below their station.  So while Jackson, with help from Ian Holm’s psychiatrist worries over hope & happiness (along with her growing distance at home with her own husband), Christie is entirely wound up in class privilege and entitlement.  She could deal with a tramp as a mistress or a social equal as rival, but with Jackson, the only explanation is love of a kind she has never known, too devastating for her to try and understand.   Beautifully observed and played, the film deserves far more attention than it receives.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Not to get too down on Merchant/Ivory, at their best traveling without a Baedeker to lean on in A ROOM WITH A VIEW/’85.  OR: More Jackson & Hugh Whitemore in the art-house hit, STEVIE/’78, about British poet Stevie Smith, filmed in a lightly stylized theatrical mode, with Mona Washbourne nearly stealing the pic (from Jackson!) as Stevie’s fading elderly Aunt.