Cinema: A Matter of Wife & Death

A Kind of Loving, though somewhat milder in its remonstrance than Room at the Top and A Taste of Honey, is nevertheless a movie with an urgent social message: the working class is the irking class in Britain. The message, never flatly delivered, is ironically implied in the plot, which involves a matter of wife and death. The hero, a hearty young draftsman named Vic (Alan Bates), works in a big mill in Lancashire and spends his spare time “chattin’ up the typies.” One day he chats up a little bit of all right (June Ritchie) who is just as twee as she can be on five quid a week, and so blonde he doesn’t notice that she’s dumb—like a fox. She sprays him with a boy bomb of cheap scent called “Desire.” and the next thing he knows she is standing there with her clothes off. Some weeks later she’s got news for him: “Om pregnant.”

He knows in advance that the marriage is a mistake, but he doesn’t know how awful a mistake. He doesn’t know how awful it can be to live with a mother-in-law (Thora Hird) who natters even worse than her daughter, who hates him for “ruining the poor girl’s life,” who before six months are up has cunningly lured his wife out of his bed and back into hers. In the end the hero gets the girl back, but does he want her? Never mind. The clot is actually determined, in his decent average conventional way. to spend the rest of his life saying he does.

The tale is trite enough, but it is written and directed with humor and warmth, and it seems to say something important to millions of moviegoers in Britain, where the film is currently breaking box-office records. As the hero. Actor Bates (of Broadway’s Look Back in Anger and The Caretaker) develops a penetrating study of a man’s man who is fundamentally a mother’s boy. As the heroine, Actress Ritchie is the golden-haired brass-brained tintype of the sort of girl men always look at twice but only take out once. And as the mother-in-law, Actress Hird is an out-and-out wedding-nightmare.