Although it has a handful of powerful and disturbing moments, the reality is that for most of its runtime my general reaction to this movie was a sense of wonder that anyone would bother to put out a movie that was so dreadfully boring. There are basically two aspects to the story: first is the lonely widowed mother Anne (played by Sarah Miles) who meets and falls in love with a sailor named Jim who's just arrived in port (Kris Kristofferson), and second is the widow's troubled son Jonathon (Jonathon Osborne) and his reaction to his mother's growing relationship with Jim.
Most of what power there is in the movie comes from the story of Jonathon. The boy has a definite Oedipus complex, regularly spying on his naked mother as she engages in various types of sex play (with Jim and with herself) and he's fallen in with a bad group of kids who've formed a secret society of some type under the leadership of an even more disturbed boy who has a fixation with mutilating animals. There's nothing particularly likable about the boys. They're disturbed - perhaps even evil. The leader of the group (Earl Rhodes) plots to make sure that Jonathon will turn against Jim (perhaps he was afraid that a relationship between the two would lessen his own influence over Jonathon) and succeeds in enlisting Jonathon as part of a horrendous plot to deal with the situation. The story of the relationship between Anne and Jim was less interesting to me. It seemed to come out of nowhere and perhaps for that reason didn't strike me as believable.
There's some humour in the movie (especially the tea room scene!) but overall this is a very dark and twisted story. For the most part I found it uninteresting and unpleasant, although it does lead up to quite a climax in the end. There's a fair amount of nudity involving Sarah Miles, and a few sex scenes (although nothing explicit.) My own opinion, though, was that overall - in spite of a few good scenes - this was dreadfully dull. (3/10)
Most of what power there is in the movie comes from the story of Jonathon. The boy has a definite Oedipus complex, regularly spying on his naked mother as she engages in various types of sex play (with Jim and with herself) and he's fallen in with a bad group of kids who've formed a secret society of some type under the leadership of an even more disturbed boy who has a fixation with mutilating animals. There's nothing particularly likable about the boys. They're disturbed - perhaps even evil. The leader of the group (Earl Rhodes) plots to make sure that Jonathon will turn against Jim (perhaps he was afraid that a relationship between the two would lessen his own influence over Jonathon) and succeeds in enlisting Jonathon as part of a horrendous plot to deal with the situation. The story of the relationship between Anne and Jim was less interesting to me. It seemed to come out of nowhere and perhaps for that reason didn't strike me as believable.
There's some humour in the movie (especially the tea room scene!) but overall this is a very dark and twisted story. For the most part I found it uninteresting and unpleasant, although it does lead up to quite a climax in the end. There's a fair amount of nudity involving Sarah Miles, and a few sex scenes (although nothing explicit.) My own opinion, though, was that overall - in spite of a few good scenes - this was dreadfully dull. (3/10)