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The bull dyke in the china shop, "a somewhat unfortunate simile." In a most saccharine soap opera Sister George (Beryl Reid) is everybody's favorite caregiver, offscreen the actress prefers tweed suits and stiff drinks and childlike gals. (Ditching studio for pub, she stumbles into a cab and helps herself to the novice nuns in the backseat.) "Love and affection" are the universal urges, yet jealousy and pique fuel the relationship with the dim poetess in the blue nightie (Susannah York). A typical afternoon has the splenetic protagonist nearly decapitating her flatmate's favorite doll and enacting a ritualistic punishment, which the younger woman ruins by mock-savoring the phallic stogie she's been ordered to munch. A sympathetic ear in the courtesan next door (Patricia Medina), a dash of competition from the closeted network executive (Coral Browne). "Somebody's got to broaden her horizons." Robert Aldrich in London with "raving bloody lesbians," after The Dirty Dozen a battlefield for the female of the species. Showbiz cruelty, human fickleness, the painful comedy of it all. The harshest caricatures are reserved for the "normal" world invented for a black and white telly, the tenderest moments are documentary glimpses of Sapphic dancing and caressing at the Gateways Club. (The queer subtext of Laurel and Hardy is marvelously excavated with a bit of costumed horseplay while an all-girl rock band warbles "By the Light of the Silvery Moon," cf. Osborne's A Patriot for Me.) The outsider artist's self-lacerating position, building toward unsettled eroticism and closing in a deserted sound stage with the great moo of despair. "Something very obscene about the British Broadcasting Corporation," one of Aldrich's most empathetic scalds and a pillar for Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. With Ronald Fraser, Hugh Paddick, Cyril Delevanti, Sivi Aberg, Jack Raine, and Rosalie Williams.
--- Fernando F. Croce |