A Touch of Love (12) Film Review/Feature

Back in the sixties I was an avid fan of novelist Margaret Drabble and still have paperback copies of her books on my bookshelf.  

Including The Millstone, which she adapted for the screen herself under the title A Touch of Love.   It’s the story of an academic, middle class young woman Rosamund (Dennis) who finds herself pregnant after her first sexual encounter.  After an unsuccessful attempt at the old “gin and hot bath” routine – as she’s running the bath, her friends drop round and drink the gin while the bath goes cold – she decides to go ahead and embrace single motherhood.  Although she has two young men vying for her favours – Roger (John Standing) and Joe (Michael Coles) – the father of her baby is a young man she hardly knows, tv newsreader George (Ian McKellan).  

The film is very much of its time, the late sixties.  In fact at the front of this digital version of the film, is a warning to today’s audiences that they may find its historical attitudes outdated and offensive!   While you might expect those attitudes to cause the story to focus on the hardships of being an “unmarried mother”, as women in Rosamund’s situation were referred to, apart from one scene where she is heavily pressured to have her baby adopted, Rosamund has a fairly easy ride.   

Her experiences with the NHS are not always happy but she has her parents’ large London flat to live in rent free and her best friend Lydia (Eleanor Bron) with her to lend moral support and occasionally some practical help.   Late in the film Rosamund mentions the horror of having to write the odd piece of journalism while still studying in order to made a bit of money but there’s no going round the benefits office or, as it was then known in those days, “national assistance” or any other sign of the financial struggle most young women in that situation would have to deal with. 

Dennis at the time had quite a few films under her belt, most notably George Segal’s nervous and fluttery wife Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  That nervous flutter was evident in other films such as Up the Down Staircase and Sweet November, whereas in this film she makes creditable stab at a middle class English accent and the confidence that goes with that.   Particularly enjoyable is her dogged  and determined screaming the place down, when a formidable NHS sister tries to prevent her from seeing her sick child.

For McKellan on the other hand this was his first film role. That same year, 1969, he was getting high critical praise in the theatre for his performances as Shakespeare’s Edward II and Richard II and wasn’t interested in film acting.   He was persuaded to take the role by director Hussein, who had directed both him and Drabble in their  Cambridge university days in a production of Twelfth Night.  

It was a different film business way back then!   For this gangly, good looking young man with a rather charming smile it was the first of many films roles leading to world adulation in the following century for playing X-Men’s Magneto and Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings films.

The film was also a debut for director Hussein, best known at the time as the first director of Dr Who.    The success of that gave him a certain amount of prestige as  BBC TV’s only director of Indian heritage, though he still  had to work very hard to persuade the bosses to let him direct a project close to his heart, an adaptation of E.M Forster’s Passage to India.   It was in that period that I worked with Waris as his production secretary – one of the most fun filled and learning experiences of my life.  He was only a few years older than me and a delight – appreciative, never complaining or being bossy, treating me and other women on the team as equal colleagues – unusual in those days.  

Over the years as a journalist I have interviewed him several times about his films, although this was not one of them and most recently I met to him again at a screening of his film Melody (1971), which over half a century later still has a large fan following and for whom a special screening was held at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith last year.  Waris was there to answer the fans’ questions and, although now quite elderly, when chatting with me after the screening, he still remembered in great detail the projects we worked on together all those years ago.

A Touch of Love is on digital platforms, DVD and Blu-ray from 17 March.  Also includes interviews with Waris Hussein and Sir Ian Mckellan.   While Dr who fans may be interested in Hussein’s “Dr Who Diaries”, published by Radio Times https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/the-1963-doctor-who-diaries-of-waris-hussein-part-one/