Alan Pakula's followup to "Klute" and predecessor to "The Parallax View" and "All the President's Men," this picturesque mismatched romance is virtually a two-hander, one that doesn't make a great deal of sense. Timothy Bottoms, a surly college kid with an inferiority complex handed down to him by his Pulitzer Prize-winning father, can't get his life into motion, or doesn't want to, so he runs off to Spain and joins a tour where he's thrown up against prim thirtysomething Maggie Smith, a proper English lady with a dark secret. The character's a little like Deborah Kerr's repressed virgin in "Separate Tables," and while Maggie acts the hell out of her, it's not a romance we're particularly rooting for, or believe. The monosyllabic Bottoms does learn to love, but he doesn't learn anything else, he remains a jerk. The Spanish countryside, lovingly photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth, is quite gorgeous and atmospheric, the music's nice, and Pakula keeps the slender story moving along. But it remains a love story that's hard to love.
