Word: finney
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...FILM'S first sequence (set, as is the entire play, in the Elliots' cramped, drably decorated apartment in Liverpool) finds the greased-up Finney in the early sixties and on a rampage against the hypocrisy of working class morality--his own and that of his married drinking cronfies. The wedded worker's carnal ethic becomes rigid and depraved, Finney insists: rigid because after "a blighter shafts away until he accidentally shafts his way into marriage" his imposed sense of guilt keeps him from shafting on the side; depraved because the same man makes up for his nagging rigidity by "lusting...
...Finney has just turned 29--a year from 30, he notes, which will soon give way to 40--and he asks for a separation. To do what? his wife asks. "To shaft a thousand women," he cries, tearing at the colorless wallpaper that symbolizes their insipid existence. But Finney can as yet only dream about escape, and he rants and howls with frustration when he cannot muster the courage to cash in on his desire for all "the young...
...second and third sequence, in the late sixties and early seventies, Finney has discovered the dry look and found a mistress, and the Elliots have 'worked out' an arrangement which, both for their consciences and their pocketbooks, hardly works out. "I go through the motions as a providing father as long as you leave me to my own extra-marital devices," Finney stipulates, and the bitter humor is not lost as he agrees to go on as a couple "provided we stay out of each other's personal affairs...
Roberts, meanwhile, who held a barely comforting but nevertheless upper hand in the early sixties, when Finney could only rankle at his own inhibitions, must now suffer the humiliation of seeing her husband swing free and appear, at least, to be having a grand old time. The director, Anthony Page, attaches time tags to each of the film's sequences without pushing the point, but the message comes across nonetheless: in the period after marital hypocrisy had been declared taboo but before women began to really assert their rights, a housewife who had surrendered her identity to her husband faced...
...Whitehead's powerful script gives Roberts and Finney both the concentration of focus (no kids or neighbors barging in to tear them from each other's throats) and the depth of antagonism needed for tour de force performances. And Page has the good sense to refrain from superfluous footage and to let their acting say it all. (One shudders to imagine the possibilities: newsreel shots of the maturing Beatles with each jump in time, perhaps, or a montage of their interspliced faces for some misspent Bergmanesque ambiguity...