The Press: Bad Intersection

THE TAMARIND SEED Directed and Written by BLAKE EDWARDS

The only sensible use for Omar Sharif’s talent is a script that would take him to the nearest pound and put him up for adoption. He is incapable, it would seem, of conveying any emotion other than woebegone wistfulness.

That’s kibbles in the bowl for stray puppies but not exactly money in the bank for producers of romantic spy thrillers.

In Blake Edwards’ adaptation of Evelyn Anthony’s novel, Sharif is cast as an allegedly dashing Soviet spy named Sverdlov. Liberal views and a developing taste for high-living Western ways make him a prime candidate for the Lubyanka prison. Vacationing at a Caribbean resort, he meets Judith Farrow (Julie Andrews), secretary to a well-placed British official. Omar claims it is love at first sight. She thinks he is just after a quick roll in the hay. A British intelligence officer — crabbily, almost picture-savingly played by Anthony Quayle — insists that Sharif is trying to recruit her for his spy network.

It turns out that Omar is sincere enough, both in his growing anxiety to do a little espionage work and in his well-oiled lust for Julie. Just as she be gins to warm to him — despite an initial reserve that would have done Mary Poppins credit — his enemies at the KGB grow bolder. He requires Julie as a go-between to trade for his asylum a nice piece of intelligence: the name of Russia’s top agent in Britain.

There is more exposition than dramatization of an exceedingly complicated plot thereafter. Yet if Sharif could have managed a modicum of magnetism and if Andrews had finally furled that old umbrella of hers, The Tamarind Seed might have been a moving exploration of the nasty intersection where politics and personal desires meet.

Since it is hard to understand what she sees in him — or he in her, for that matter — it is difficult to care whether he is offering true love and if so, whether it can triumph over the brutality of the Russians and the blindness of the British. Director Edwards, who can be a stylish operative, here contents him self with prettily posing Andrews (who is his wife), showing off her Diors against various pleasant beaches and European capitals. Doubtless the aim here was to make an old-fashioned adventure-romance. While the nostalgia for that almost vanished form is justifiable, the slackness of this picture is not.