A TOUCH OF LOVE (1969)

Capital punishment was effectively abolished in Britain in 1965, the year Margaret Drabble’s novel The Millstone was published. At the same time, the Race Relations Act began outlawing racial discrimination. Homosexual activity was decriminalised in 1967 when the rules around abortion were also greatly relaxed. Never mind the hippies and the wilder extremes of the 1960s—this was a gradual but real liberalisation of attitudes in the starchy circles of government and the law. Yet women’s rights in many areas had to wait longer (until the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975) to be formally recognised, and it’s this slowness to acknowledge the equality of women that Drabble’s novel and Waris Hussein’s film adaptation A Touch of Love protest against.

It’s striking that only six years (and of course the Atlantic Ocean) separate A Touch of Love from The Stepford Wives (1975), with a similar gap between their source novels, yet the kind of assertive feminism on display in the latter film is light years distant from the more tentative pleas of A Touch of Love. Even its strong-minded protagonist Rosamund (Sandy Dennis) doesn’t seem to disagree that women have their place and men theirs; she just wants to be allowed a little more agency within an essentially conventional role.

Set in 1967, presumably to split the difference between the publishing date of the novel and the release date of the movie, A Touch of Love gets straight down to business in almost its first shot, with Rosamund examining a typed report of a positive pregnancy test (and circling the word “positive” in case the viewer misses the point). A doctoral student in literature, she’s regularly seeing two men, the slightly louche Joe (Michael Coles) and the posher Roger (John Standing), a chinless wonder who disapproves of the “pseudo-intellectuals and layabouts” she hangs out with. But she has largely managed to avoid sex by convincing both men that she is sleeping with the other, and we learn as the film goes on that her pregnancy arose from an unexpected and slightly inexplicable fling with the charming young broadcaster George (Ian McKellen). In the book he is a radio announcer, but in the film a TV newsreader, presumably to add visual interest; more importantly, he is implicitly gay.

Here the film—which mostly follows The Millstone pretty closely—departs from the novel in a small but significant way. Homosexuality was no longer a completely taboo subject but was still considered a bit beyond the pale for mainstream British film to deal with; it was less than a decade since Basil Dearden’s groundbreaking Victim (1961). Indeed, as was so common, A Touch of Love treats George’s sexuality through hints and winks rather than defining it outright. McKellen’s slyly subversive expressions speak volumes; Rosamund asks him (in a non-sexual context) “You lead a double life?”, and when she says she wants to know all about him, he asks “What do you mean, ‘all’?”.

Moreover, if an outwardly gay man in a sympathetic major role would raise some eyebrows, frankly addressing bisexuality was out of the question. Yet in Drabble’s book, it’s much clearer that George might be bisexual, which makes his encounter with Rosamund more plausible and look less like an awkward plot contrivance. The film, unable to do more than tiptoe around the topic, risks making the character of George appear self-contradictory. It’s one of many cases where A Touch of Love edges up close to a subject but then seems nervous about tackling it fully, and if the nervousness is understandable in this case given the constraints of the time, with some of the film’s other themes it’s not.

However, though the Rosamund-George relationship does provide an undercurrent of sadness to A Touch of Love—it becomes clear that Rosamund will never tell George he is her baby’s father, even though he would probably be a fine one, and a better partner for her than either Joe or Roger—it’s not the film’s main concern. Instead, the focus is on her insistence on having her baby and keeping it, which brings her into conflict both with her own friends and with the healthcare system; nearly everyone presumes she will either opt for an abortion or give the child up for adoption, depending on how conservative their own attitudes are. The film then tapers off toward the end into a slightly pointless-feeling coda depicting Rosamund as a happy mother, one of several ways in which A Touch of Love doesn’t quite work.

Drabble admits in one of the extras on this disc that she is “not a natural screenwriter” and there are many elements of the novel which don’t translate successfully to the screen. A great deal of The Millstone is given over to Rosamund’s thoughts, for example in a scene set in a doctor’s waiting room where she first encounters the reality of the National Health Service, but this richness is lost (it’s difficult to convey without voiceover, of course) and the film can come across as a series of incidents. Similarly, though the book makes it clear that Rosamund’s literary research is a big part of her life and substitutes to some extent for personal relationships, it’s ignored in the film nearly to the point of non-existence. The very first shot shows some ecclesiastical-looking windows in the British Museum Reading Room, suggesting that for Rosamund this is almost a place of worship—but thereafter we hear virtually nothing about it, and this has the effect of making Rosamund appear more passive than was Drabble’s intention, a woman with no driving purpose in her life until her unexpected pregnancy.

Time can be confusing, too; it’s not always obvious when the film is shifting from the present into a flashback, or how much time has passed between scenes, and the fact that the physical settings are all rather similar doesn’t help here. But despite these problems—which mostly lie with the writing, occasionally exacerbated by direction—A Touch of Love does manage to maintain interest, greatly aided by strong performances in all the main roles.

Nebraska-born Dennis, who had recently received an Academy Award for her role in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), was a weird choice to play the lead in such an English film but she is almost wholly convincing, her accent only slipping at the occasional moment, and she manages to convey well an inner strength beneath her diffident manner. She is much less outwardly confident than characters like her friend Lydia (Eleanor Bron) or the strict nurses she encounters in the health system, but ultimately it’s Rosamund who is the truly independent woman.

It’s McKellen, though, who steals the show whenever he appears (after the initial shock of seeing Gandalf so very, very young). Though his role is crucial to the storyline it is relatively small, and he is absent for long stretches of the film, but he brings every moment when he does appear alive. The dog seen with him in a London park, by the way, was the actor’s real pet.

Also strong in supporting roles are Bron as Lydia, the always reliable Maurice Denham as a doctor, and Coles as Joe—who, although not presented as a specifically bad character, nevertheless represents much of what Rosamund (and by extension all British women) had to put up with every day. He says women are interchangeable, and believes that they all “want to have babies, it gives them a sense of purpose”. It says a great deal both about Rosamund as a character and about her world that this is her friend speaking; though her pals are writers, broadcasters and so on, and have more liberal attitudes than preceding generations, they are still more conservative than truly bohemian. This is decidedly non-swinging London.

Hussein’s direction, in his feature debut after a TV career, is confident and competent but not flashy—the closest he comes to making a big visual statement is with the repeated use of the Post Office Tower (now the BT Tower), opened in 1966 and extraordinarily futuristic at the time, in the background to the London exteriors. We’re this modern, he seems to be saying, and yet we still treat women this way? Mostly, though, he concentrates on managing smaller particulars for precise effect: Rosamund and George’s ungainly fully-clad tumble on the sofa is wittily and truthfully staged, for example. After that, George’s departure from Rosamund’s flat is a wonderfully observed scene where the most minor things illustrate the strangeness of the situation they find themselves in: he adjusts his hair to get it just so, not something that would have been considered very manly in 1969; she holds his jacket for him like a dutiful wife; he kisses her at the doorway but on the cheek.

For modern audiences, there’s also much delightful period detail. Michael Dress’s score stays decorously in the background for the most part, although there is one powerful moment toward the end—when Rosamund’s daughter is sick and she is trying to study in the British Library—where it erupts into chaos.

A Touch of Love is far from a wholly successful film. The British critic Leslie Halliwell called it a “curious bid” for respectability by its producers—two Americans, Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky, much better known for cheap horror—and you certainly get the impression that it is often held back from being the movie it ought to be. It’s undramatic almost to a fault. Rosamund’s plight is so understated that the narrative turning points can come across as anti-climactic: she isn’t denied an abortion (because she doesn’t ask for one), she isn’t prevented from keeping her baby (even if she is criticised for it), she isn’t badly treated, her parents are supportive and she doesn’t lose any of her friends.

There’s a lot of talk about the institution of marriage and a lot of talk about the state of being alone (Rosamund says it is “better than most of the alternatives”), but these ideas are not explored very deeply, and it’s difficult to avoid the feeling that there is another film trying and failing to emerge from this one, a film not only about Rosamund’s experiences as a single mother but also about the relationship she might have had with George. Still, even if A Touch of Love frustratingly never achieves either the rhetorical power or the emotional depth you hope it might, it’s consistently well-acted, and interesting as a product of a pivotal time in the evolution of British society.

UK | 1969 | 107 MINUTES | 1.66:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Blu-ray Special Features:

• High-definition transfer from the original camera negative. StudioCanal warns that “the picture still displays some minor faults including colour fluctuations, dirt, scratches and film movement”, but in fact these are barely noticeable, and the feeling that you are watching 35mm film rather than a digital image adds to the evocation of the period.
• NEW A Woman’s Right to Choose: An Interview with Waris Hussein. The director mostly talks about the film itself, rather than its production or his career, which goes a long way toward making up for the absence of a commentary.
• NEW Adapting The Millstone: Interview with Dame Margaret Drabble. A fascinating, honest discussion from the author, who wanted to be an actress before deciding that writing fiction was easier. She’s outspoken about the film though not always negative—she likes the cast, for example, but not the title. There is also quite a lot about the writing of the book (and she doesn’t like its title, either).
• NEW Sir Ian McKellen: A Touch of Love. McKellen is an engaging speaker but this is slightly less interesting than the Hussein and Drabble extras, and more focused on the actual making of the movie.
• Q&A with Waris Hussein and Sir Ian McKellen. A wide-ranging, chatty discussion from 2018 that benefits from the interplay between the two participants, and adds some additional insights to the individual interviews.
• US Theatrical Trailer. For the US market—where the title was changed to the meaningless Thank You All Very Much—the trailer unsurprisingly plays up the role of Sandy Dennis and downplays questions about British society.
• English subtitles.

Cast & Crew

director: Waris Hussein.
writer: Margaret Drabble (based on her novel ‘The Millstone’).
starring: Sandy Dennis, Ian McKellen, Michael Coles, John Standing & Eleanor Bron.