This is a real wild early 70's black sex farce, a look at the philandering that goes on amongst a group of upper crust Britishers with questionable morals. The ultra snooty socialite Lee Remick, married to Ian Holm, is philandering with Richard Attenborough, and Holm starts to fool around with Jennie Linden. When he announces to Remick (who has asked him for a divorce) that he intends to be with Linden, she tells him that he'll never be free of her, obviously intending to keep him at her beck and call for her own little sex games. When she arranges for a double date between all four people, she is oh so gracious, but Linden is disgusted by the whole fake burst of manners. The severe looking psychiatrist Claire Bloom, finding the whole level of games disgusting, finds herself falling for Holm, adding more bizarre twists to this very adult view of the residents of Wonderland.
"I want you savagely, and if I have to I will fight for you savagely", Holm tells Bloom in a key moment after a whole series of wild events have occurred. You need a scorecard to keep track of who is with who, but after a while, you just give up and start to have fun with it. Lee Remick in particular seems to enjoy being deliciously outrageous, and Bloom, initially resembling Lee Grant, eventually starts to look like a disgusted version of Morticia Addams as played by Carolyn Jones.
I too after a while gave up with trying to keep track of what was going on and it began to enjoy this for simply just the wildness of everything and how much fun these characters were having trying to up the other, a few seemingly trying to destroy the others. This takes the drawing room comedy of the 1930's and gives it a very adult 70's twist. You know that none of these people are really going to end up happy, so waiting for that moral fall to occur becomes delightfully grim. Whatever the title actually refers to becomes a strange metaphor as quoted by Bloom who steals every moment she's on screen by being the moral judge at one moment then an unwilling but eager participant the next.
"I want you savagely, and if I have to I will fight for you savagely", Holm tells Bloom in a key moment after a whole series of wild events have occurred. You need a scorecard to keep track of who is with who, but after a while, you just give up and start to have fun with it. Lee Remick in particular seems to enjoy being deliciously outrageous, and Bloom, initially resembling Lee Grant, eventually starts to look like a disgusted version of Morticia Addams as played by Carolyn Jones.
I too after a while gave up with trying to keep track of what was going on and it began to enjoy this for simply just the wildness of everything and how much fun these characters were having trying to up the other, a few seemingly trying to destroy the others. This takes the drawing room comedy of the 1930's and gives it a very adult 70's twist. You know that none of these people are really going to end up happy, so waiting for that moral fall to occur becomes delightfully grim. Whatever the title actually refers to becomes a strange metaphor as quoted by Bloom who steals every moment she's on screen by being the moral judge at one moment then an unwilling but eager participant the next.