As previous reviewers have noted, this is not a horror film, but a comedy based on an Iris Murdoch novel. Curiously, what should have been pitched at a farcical level comes across flat and the humor, such as it is, very British and very dry. Murdoch's novel itself reads as a near-farce, tongue in cheek, without a demand from the reader to suspend disbelief, but to go along for the ride. The portentousness of the "severed head" comment and the perverse exotic erotic goings on of Honor Klein (Claire Blooms in the film--and she does look like a Modigliani!)--all read like symbolic trappings intended to indicate some deeper meaning (it ain't there.) The film comes across restrained, if not nearly constipated, thanks mainly to Ian Holm's performance. His character, our triply-cuckolded protagonist, is frankly a quite unsympathetic character, really a nasty little man throughout. In fact, it is difficult to work up much feeling for any of these characters. Formally, this is just this side of a filmed stage play (scripters Priestly and Murdoch having adapted screenplay from a stage play), it plays like it, and makes it a mediocre film experience. Having said all that, there is something , or there are some things that keep it going on the DVD player: Lee Remick is actually trying to do farce, which is whatis called for, while Claire Bloom is intriguingly exotic and erotic(a creation of Murdoch's. If you're somewhat anglophilic, you'll probably enjoy this, trailing its clouds of "swinging sixties London" glory behind it, a kind of last gasp I suppose.
13 Reviews
British Humor
claudio_carvalho8 February 2016
The wine taster and merchant Martin Lynch-Gibbon (Ian Holm) is married with the shallow and spoiled Antonia Lynch-Gibbon (Lee Remick) and loves his mistress Georgie Hands (Jennie Linden). Antonia is under therapy with Martin's best friend, the psychiatrist Palmer Anderson (Richard Attenborough). One day, Antonia decides to ask for the divorce to Martin to live with Palmer, but they want to keep Martin as their friend. When Palmer's sister Dr. Honor Klein (Claire Bloom) comes from Oxford to stay with her brother, she discloses the affair of Georgie, who was her student, and Martin to Palmer and Antonia. Meanwhile Martin's brother Alexander Lynch-Gibbon (Clive Revill) has a love affair with Georgie and Martin falls in unrequited love with Honor, but he discovers a secret about Palmer. Who will stay with whom in the end?
"A Severed Head" is an unfunny British comedy about infidelity that maybe satisfies the British humor. The story is awful and wastes a wonderful cast with names such as Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough and Ian Holm among others. It is impossible to give a single laugh after 98 minutes running time. My vote is four.
Title (Brazil): "Amantes Infiéis" ("Unfaithful Lovers")
"A Severed Head" is an unfunny British comedy about infidelity that maybe satisfies the British humor. The story is awful and wastes a wonderful cast with names such as Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough and Ian Holm among others. It is impossible to give a single laugh after 98 minutes running time. My vote is four.
Title (Brazil): "Amantes Infiéis" ("Unfaithful Lovers")
The title is AWFUL but the film is .........
TequilaMockingbird6315 June 2005
I had to watch this film recently and expected to see HORROR film. A SEVERED HEAD!? h-e-l-l-o? Only to find out this is a comedy... I THINK? Very dry, very British. The confusing title would be explained at the end of the film as the character Honor quotes:
"Go back to reality Martin,... I am an object of terrible fascination to you, A Severed Head such as primitive tribes used putting a morsel of gold on it's tongue to make it utter prophecies, as real people you and i do not exist for one and other."
I know, huh? I didn't get the correlation either. Seeing there are only 3 user comments (at the time of this review) I feel bad for so many films like this. So many thousands of films that took so long to make and so many actors gave great performances only to fall into the abyss of obscurity. Worth watching though if only for Lee Remick who is absolutely stunning and quite a skilled dead pan comic.
"Go back to reality Martin,... I am an object of terrible fascination to you, A Severed Head such as primitive tribes used putting a morsel of gold on it's tongue to make it utter prophecies, as real people you and i do not exist for one and other."
I know, huh? I didn't get the correlation either. Seeing there are only 3 user comments (at the time of this review) I feel bad for so many films like this. So many thousands of films that took so long to make and so many actors gave great performances only to fall into the abyss of obscurity. Worth watching though if only for Lee Remick who is absolutely stunning and quite a skilled dead pan comic.
Interesting idea that deserved a better cast and a more seasoned director.
christopher-underwood12 March 2019
There is something not quite right here. I didn't see the stage play and it is many, many years since I read the book but it seems that perhaps director Dick Clement didn't really have a tight enough grip on this. I appreciate that because of the title some mistakenly expect a horror film and I have seen some describe this as an hilarious farce. Well, it is not very funny despite the odd amusing, if rather predictable, dig at the English middle class. Certainly this is not played as a farce, although Lee Remick seems to have this notion and plays it to the hilt wit much repetition of line and (over) action. Everybody seems to go their own way as if they are giving a solo performance, unrelated to anybody else and it is left to Jennie Linden to play it as it seems it should be played. Apparently her part was originally conceived as being for Julie Christie and I would have thought that then she would have stuck out even more. Claire Bloom's performance is a brave one but she seems just as much in her own bubble as Attenborough, Holm and Remick. Interesting idea that deserved a better cast and a more seasoned director.
A Severed Head
henry8-326 May 2019
Focussed on Ian Holmes wine merchant, a group of bored middle class professionals fill their lives by having a series of doomed affairs with each other.
Time has not been kind to this 'satire' based on Iris Murdoch's book. The characters are pretty much all detestable or plain daft and although Holmes brings the occasional smile to the face, the other characters particularly Attenborough and Remick are so unrealistic it's impossible to buy into what was presumably supposed to be sharp and biting.
Firmer direction might have helped - overall, sloppy.
Time has not been kind to this 'satire' based on Iris Murdoch's book. The characters are pretty much all detestable or plain daft and although Holmes brings the occasional smile to the face, the other characters particularly Attenborough and Remick are so unrealistic it's impossible to buy into what was presumably supposed to be sharp and biting.
Firmer direction might have helped - overall, sloppy.
"You're nothing but a pack of cards, all of you."
mark.waltz30 April 2021
Warning: Spoilers
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.
Well
leavymusic-23 June 2020
All is lies
stefanozucchelli14 November 2021
British humor for a movie that more than a comedy assimilates to a tragedy.
Strange alliances and betrayals are mixed within a group of people in which no one speaks openly about their feelings but hides behind a semblance of civilization.
Strange alliances and betrayals are mixed within a group of people in which no one speaks openly about their feelings but hides behind a semblance of civilization.
This is A Mystery
malcolmgsw8 December 2018
This is a mystery not a comedy.How can the film makers make such a mess of anything written by Irish Murdoch and J.B.Priestley.If that wasn't bad enough to lumber it with such a dreadful title.No wonder the distributors put this on the shelf for a couple of years.Shameful waste of all the talent involved.No doubt Blooms top less scene was included to boost the box office.
Iris Murdoch Deserved Better Than this
JamesHitchcock9 October 2023
Although Iris Murdoch was one of the most distinguished British novelists of the second half of the twentieth century, her work has been almost completely ignored by the cinema. "A Severed Head" is the only one of her twenty-six novels to have been made into a feature film. (Two others, "An Unofficial Rose" and "The Bell", have been serialised for television).
The story, a study of adultery among the wealthy upper middle classes of London, put me in mind of Dorothy Parker's celebrated bon mot about the Bloomsbury Group, namely that they lived in squares and loved in triangles, although you would need a more complicated figure than the humble triangle to do justice to the amatory geometry of Iris Murdoch's characters. Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a well-to-do wine merchant, thinks that he has it all- plenty of money, a house in an exclusive part of London, a beautiful wife, Antonia, and a beautiful younger mistress, Georgie. Martin's world, however, is rocked when Antonia informs him that she wants a divorce. The reason is not Martin's affair with Georgie; at this stage in the proceedings Antonia is still unaware of his infidelity. The reason is that Antonia herself has been having an affair with her psychoanalyst Palmer Anderson, a good friend of Martin.
The film then chronicles the various developments and revelations ensuing from Antonia's announcement. These involve Martin, Antonia, Palmer, Georgie and two further characters, Martin's brother Alexander, a sculptor, and Palmer's half-sister Honor Klein, a lecturer in anthropology at Cambridge. Although the film is based on a short novel, of only just over two hundred pages in my edition, there is certainly insufficient space in this review to set out all the plot twists. The characters in the novel, and this is reflected in the film as well, see themselves as "civilised", a word which for them means "blasé about sexual misconduct"- something else they have in common with the Bloomsbury group, who likewise prided themselves on their ability to rise above conventional morality, at least as far as sex is concerned. Palmer is particularly concerned that everyone involved in the tangled web of relationships should be as "civilised" as possible, even when their activities stray into illegal territory. (Besides his affair with Antonia, Palmer is also sleeping with Honor. He claims that because she is only his half-sister they are not committing incest, but the law would not recognise that as a defence).
Watching the film made me realise a possible reason why Murdoch is not the cinema's favourite author. An outline of her plots might make them seem like standard "adultery in Hampstead" literary fare, but actually they are a lot more complicated than that. Murdoch mades great use of visual and verbal imagery and raises complex psychological and philosophical themes. It can be difficult for film-makers to find a cinematic equivalent to these matters, and the makers of "A Severed Head" never really seem to try.
A couple of examples will show what I mean. The action of the novel takes place in December and January, and the weather plays an important part. The earlier scenes take place against a backdrop of mist, haze or dense fog. Towards the end of the novel, however, the weather clears, and fog and haze give way to sunlight. Murdoch's descriptions of the weather are not simply coincidental; they also have symbolic importance, representing Martin's progress from ignorance towards knowledge. The film-makers, however, do not seem to have realised this point, and shot the whole film in summer sunshine.
In the novel the image of the "severed head" has a number of interlinked meanings, too complicated to set out here. The film script keeps Murdoch's title, but makes no attempt to explain the complex meaning which she gives it, with the result that viewers will probably be baffled why the film is called that. I can, however, reassure those who dislike gore and bloodshed in the movies that nobody's head actually gets severed, although one character does threaten another with a sword.
The novel is told in the first person, with Martin as narrator, and can be seen as his journey from a complacent hedonism to a growing awareness that life is not always as simple as his "civilised" system of values and that he cannot just dismiss morality as an irrelevance. He is not in love with either Antonia or Georgie, but carries on his double life because it suits his purposes, without ever considering the emotional cost to the two women. The film dispenses with a narrator and also with much of Murdoch's more serious themes; it ends up like a Brian Rix style bedroom farce interspersed with occasional more serious moments such as an attempted suicide.
The result is a filleting of Murdoch's novel with much of her meaning removed. There are some well-known actors such as Richard Attenborough, Lee Remick and Claire Bloom among the cast, but none of them seem to be making much effort. "A Severed Head" is not my favourite Murdoch novel, but it deserved a better adaptation than this. Perhaps it is as well that the cinema has steered clear of Murdoch since 1971. 4/10.
The story, a study of adultery among the wealthy upper middle classes of London, put me in mind of Dorothy Parker's celebrated bon mot about the Bloomsbury Group, namely that they lived in squares and loved in triangles, although you would need a more complicated figure than the humble triangle to do justice to the amatory geometry of Iris Murdoch's characters. Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a well-to-do wine merchant, thinks that he has it all- plenty of money, a house in an exclusive part of London, a beautiful wife, Antonia, and a beautiful younger mistress, Georgie. Martin's world, however, is rocked when Antonia informs him that she wants a divorce. The reason is not Martin's affair with Georgie; at this stage in the proceedings Antonia is still unaware of his infidelity. The reason is that Antonia herself has been having an affair with her psychoanalyst Palmer Anderson, a good friend of Martin.
The film then chronicles the various developments and revelations ensuing from Antonia's announcement. These involve Martin, Antonia, Palmer, Georgie and two further characters, Martin's brother Alexander, a sculptor, and Palmer's half-sister Honor Klein, a lecturer in anthropology at Cambridge. Although the film is based on a short novel, of only just over two hundred pages in my edition, there is certainly insufficient space in this review to set out all the plot twists. The characters in the novel, and this is reflected in the film as well, see themselves as "civilised", a word which for them means "blasé about sexual misconduct"- something else they have in common with the Bloomsbury group, who likewise prided themselves on their ability to rise above conventional morality, at least as far as sex is concerned. Palmer is particularly concerned that everyone involved in the tangled web of relationships should be as "civilised" as possible, even when their activities stray into illegal territory. (Besides his affair with Antonia, Palmer is also sleeping with Honor. He claims that because she is only his half-sister they are not committing incest, but the law would not recognise that as a defence).
Watching the film made me realise a possible reason why Murdoch is not the cinema's favourite author. An outline of her plots might make them seem like standard "adultery in Hampstead" literary fare, but actually they are a lot more complicated than that. Murdoch mades great use of visual and verbal imagery and raises complex psychological and philosophical themes. It can be difficult for film-makers to find a cinematic equivalent to these matters, and the makers of "A Severed Head" never really seem to try.
A couple of examples will show what I mean. The action of the novel takes place in December and January, and the weather plays an important part. The earlier scenes take place against a backdrop of mist, haze or dense fog. Towards the end of the novel, however, the weather clears, and fog and haze give way to sunlight. Murdoch's descriptions of the weather are not simply coincidental; they also have symbolic importance, representing Martin's progress from ignorance towards knowledge. The film-makers, however, do not seem to have realised this point, and shot the whole film in summer sunshine.
In the novel the image of the "severed head" has a number of interlinked meanings, too complicated to set out here. The film script keeps Murdoch's title, but makes no attempt to explain the complex meaning which she gives it, with the result that viewers will probably be baffled why the film is called that. I can, however, reassure those who dislike gore and bloodshed in the movies that nobody's head actually gets severed, although one character does threaten another with a sword.
The novel is told in the first person, with Martin as narrator, and can be seen as his journey from a complacent hedonism to a growing awareness that life is not always as simple as his "civilised" system of values and that he cannot just dismiss morality as an irrelevance. He is not in love with either Antonia or Georgie, but carries on his double life because it suits his purposes, without ever considering the emotional cost to the two women. The film dispenses with a narrator and also with much of Murdoch's more serious themes; it ends up like a Brian Rix style bedroom farce interspersed with occasional more serious moments such as an attempted suicide.
The result is a filleting of Murdoch's novel with much of her meaning removed. There are some well-known actors such as Richard Attenborough, Lee Remick and Claire Bloom among the cast, but none of them seem to be making much effort. "A Severed Head" is not my favourite Murdoch novel, but it deserved a better adaptation than this. Perhaps it is as well that the cinema has steered clear of Murdoch since 1971. 4/10.
Off-putting at first
A-No_12 September 2009
Warning: Spoilers
A movie about six people who are constantly shifting sexual alliances and expect each other to remain calm and polite about it all. This movie really irritated me for the first hour or so, in particular Lee Remick's self-absorbed and extreme flightiness, as well as Richard Attenborough's odious civility. But by the time it was over, I was won over by its offbeat approach and ultimately rather scathing critique of the seeming British need to retain manner and form despite the repulsive behaviour of one's peers. And for me, Claire Bloom steals the film as a morbid anthropologist who looks like she just stepped out of a Modigliani painting.
La Rhonde with wit.
maeander3 January 2003
This stylish sophisticated high comedy on sexual desire and the nature of love is highly recommended. Witty and charming, it boasts an outstanding cast of actors. Not your regular cup of tea, these three couples not only manage to swap mates a number of times between them; but manage to do it with such flair that you cannot help but enjoy the ride along the way.
It may not be everyone's taste, but if you are looking for something more than a run of the mill romantic comedy; this is for you. In some ways, it could be considered a version of "Bridget Jones Diaries" for people who have actually read Jane Austen and not just seen the adaptations. Murdoch was a powerhouse in her time, and this shows you why.
It may not be everyone's taste, but if you are looking for something more than a run of the mill romantic comedy; this is for you. In some ways, it could be considered a version of "Bridget Jones Diaries" for people who have actually read Jane Austen and not just seen the adaptations. Murdoch was a powerhouse in her time, and this shows you why.
Wonderful movie
leogrrrl0116 August 2006
One of my favorite movies ever, largely due to the fact that Iris Murdoch is my favorite author of all time. I saw this as a fairly young child, and it stuck in my head for years. Two of the best actresses ever, Claire Bloom and Lee Remick. Claire was perfect as Honor, like a tightly wound spring. The relationship between Honor and her brother is pure Iris Murdoch, whose characters always had complicated and sometimes quite twisted relationships. Very funny movie, as well, as is also typical of Ms. Murdoch's works.
I would highly recommend this movie to young adult audiences who like alternative and artistic, literary movies.
I would highly recommend this movie to young adult audiences who like alternative and artistic, literary movies.
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