A Touch of Love

TCM had a night of Sandy Dennis movies a few months back, and as always it gave me a chance to record a couple of movies I hadn't seen before. One of those was on the TCM schedule under the title Thank You All Very Much, although the title card on the print TCM ran, and a lot of the sources I've come across, all suggest that the movie is most commonly known by the title A Touch of Love.

Sandy Dennis plays Rosamund Stacey, a British woman who as the movie opens is studying for her Ph.D. and doing research at the British Museum in London. However, she's just gotten the news that the pregnancy test she took yielded a positive result, which is obviously a bit of a problem if she wants to keep studying for that doctorate. Abortion was still technically illegal in the UK at the time the movie was set (the test result she received was dated September 1967; the law making abortion legal, although passed one month later, only went into effect several months following that and in any case the movie is based on a novel first published a few years earlier), so Rosamund thinks about trying to induce a miscarriage through one of those old folk techniques like the one from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning about getting yourself drunk on gin and then taking an exceedingly hot bath.

But she's stopped by a bunch of her friends showing up at her flat to have a bit of an impromptu party or perhaps go out for the evening. Among them are both of the men Rosamund has been dating, Joe and Roger. Well, actually, there's a third man if you believe Rosamund, as she tells both Joe and Roger that the father of the child is a man neither of them has ever met. As it turns out, she's telling the partial truth about this, as there's a third guy around, on George (Ian McKellen in one of his first roles). George works for the BBC as a newsreader, and he's introduced to Rosamund by Joe. They have a one-night stand, and that's what knocked poor Rosamund up.

Rosamund talks to her best friend Lydia (Eleanor Bron) about the baby and they also talk about abortion, and after these conversations Rosamund begins to think about keeping the baby. She can't tell her parents, because they're socialists who have decided to go off to Africa for reasons and in any case have always been emotionally distant from Rosamund.

Eventually, Rosamund carries the baby to term, and this is scandalous because back in those days, it was naturally expected that a single mother would give the baby up for adoption rather than trying to raise the child herself. But Rosamund has by this time decided to do just that, with some help from Lydia with whom she is now living. Unfortunately, the baby is sickly, and this causes even more difficulty with all the hospital nurses who are very judgmental about Rosamund. (That last bit surprised considering that these are NHS nurses and the NHS is treated with religious reverence in the UK.)

A Touch of Love is another of those movies from just after the Production Code in Hollywood went by the boards, when even UK filmmakers could make more "daring" stuff and get it distributed in America. Sandy Dennis isn't quite the right actress to play the British Rosamund, and to be honest I found it hard to care too much about her or any of the other characters in this movie. As I said, it wants to be daring, but 50-plus years on it feels dated. Worse is that it feels like it doesn't go anywhere, with a rather abrupt ending.

But perhaps you may want to give A Touch of Love a chance as a bit of a time capsule.