The return of the soldier

National Review, April 5, 1985 by John Simon

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER, based on the first novel of the then 24-year-old Rebecca West, is the second theatrical film of the British television director Alan Bridges. His The Hireling (1973) dealt likewise with the foundering of love on England's rigid social barriers, and it too was a watchable film, no less and no more. Ten years later (Soldier was kept on the shelf a couple of years), Bridges again explores how an upper-class person, this time a man, misses out on happiness with al lower-class woman. Shellshocked in World War I, Chris Baldry suffers from amnesia. Passionately he remembers Margaret, his youthful romance, now a dowdy, married drudge; dimly, as one does a childhood playmate, he recalls Jenny, his still adoring spinster cousin; not at all does he recognize Kitty, his haughty, gelid, self-centered wife.

How this amnesiac staggers and lurches among these three women, who in their various ways still love him, makes for a respectable, predictable, and finally uninvolving tale. What interest there is in the situation, not in the development, of which there is hardly any. We are roughly on the level of Random Harvest, the 1942 amnesia film, but far below Jean Anouilh's riveting 1936 play, Le Voyageur sans bagage. There is fine production design by Luciana Arrighi, appropriate costuming by Shirley russell, suitable music (Richard Rodney Bennett) and cinematography (Stephen Goldblatt), and Hugh Whitemore's screenplay deviates minimally from the true West.

Bridges has directed with conventional knowhow full of misty flashbacks, and the only real interest--not necessarily wholesome--is in the casting and acting. Alan Bates has played a virile, sexy, but somehow off-kilter hero so many times that he could do it not only in his sleep but even with amnesia; Julie Christie can do the cold bitch Kitty with only slightly diminished good looks and undiminished histrionic mediocrity. But casting Glenda Jackson as even a former beauty, and as warm and life-enhancing, is a royal jest; and Ann-Margret as British, refined, and suffering with genteel self-abnegation is even funnier, though critics such as Vincent Canby prostrated themselves before this performance. Casting a pitchfork as a dessert spoon would be just as impressive.