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Directed by Alan Bridges in 1982
Script by Hugh Whitemore from Rebecca West's 1918 novel
distributed by 20th Century Fox, 101 minutes
An analysis...
From Magill's Survey of Cinema
 Chris Baldry (Alan Bates) returns from World
War I a victim of amnesia. Instead of returning to his wife,
Kitty (Julie Christie), and his cousin Jenny (Ann-Margret), Chris
contacts his first love, Margaret Grey (Glenda Jackson). Although
Jenny and Kitty resent and dislike the lower-class, dowdy Margaret,
the three women conspire to restore Chris's memory. They do,
and Chris returns to the front. ...
 Based on Rebecca West's first novel (published
in 1918), The Return of the Soldier is -- on the level
of plot -- a simple, somewhat dated, sentimental story, which
employs an overused, nineteenth century, melodramatic device:
amnesia. In the hands of director Alan Bridges and screenwriter
Hugh Whitemore, however, the film becomes a penetrating psychological
study communicating the essence of West's work. ...
Novelist Rebecca West's pioneering attempt
to incorporate Sigmund Freud's analysis of human psychology at
both the symbolic and narrative level is maintained in the film
version of The Return of the Soldier. Delineated as representations
of mind (Jenny), body (Kitty), and soul (Margaret), the three
women in The Return of the Soldier also neatly represent
Freud's conception of the tripartite mind. Kitty is the superego,
a soulless, patterned, rational being. Jenny is the mediator,
the ego, compassionate and loving, yet successful in suppressing
her sexual desires for her cousin. Finally, it is the instinctual
Margaret who champions the id with her innate sensuality.
The film is not sentimentalized...
The conflict in the
drama lies in Chris's internal integration of this externalized
psyche. To become fully human, he must accept the role of each
of these women, denying none of these parts of himself. Margaret,
like Chris, uses the trauma to integrate her buried past and
emerge a whole woman. Jenny also experiences growth. Through
Margaret's presence, Jenny awakes to Kitty's falseness, to the
fragility of their mannered lives, and to her own compromised
role in Chris's home. She realizes that while there was a place
for her in his marriage, there is no room for her in his love
affair. Kitty, however, remains unchanged. Always the somnambulist,
she sleepwalks through the drama, clinging to the hope that her
ordered life will be regained through Chris's cure. She is untouched
by the events, still the ideal Victorian woman -- a beautiful
object. In her highly cultured state, however, Kitty is forever
brittle, emotionless, and ultimately lifeless. ...
 Director
Alan Bridges, whose film The Hireling won The Cannes Golden
Palm for Best Picture in 1973, and Hugh Whitemore, who has done
distinguished work in British television (Elizabeth R,
All Creatures Great and Small and Rebecca) as well
as film and theater (Stevie, 1978), together have maintained
a literary quality in The Return of the Soldier.
The film is extremely faithful to its source;
few scenes are added or altered. A letter telling of Chris's
condition becomes a visit to the hospital, while a trip to Monkey
Island replaces a verbal description. In contrast to the novel,
the film is not sentimentalized; if anything, it is too detached,
lacking the feelings commensurate with such vital interpersonal
drama.
* Despite a positive reception at the Cannes
Film Festival in May, 1982, The Return of the Soldier
met with mixed reviews. The film also suffered from distribution
problems; because of litigation, it was withheld from United
States and Canadian markets until late 1984. Again, the American
reviews praised the performances -- especially Ann-Margret' s
Jenny -- but found the film as a whole unsatisfying.
Cary Grant and Deborah
Kerr proposed by Warner Bros...
Finding the film too
literary and restrained, critics suggested that The Return
of the Soldier might have been more successful had Bridges
employed a sentimental treatment imitative of the style of such
1940's tearjerkers as Random Harvest (1942) or Love
Letters (1945) -- both stories of romance and amnesia. In
fact, Warner Bros. had planned a production of The Return
of the Soldier for Bette Davis (as Margaret Grey) in 1946,
based on a screenplay by women's films "expert" Catherine
Turney, but the project was abandoned. The studio reactivated
the script in 1958, hoping to cast Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr
after their success in An Affair to Remember (1957), but
The Return of the Soldier remained unproduced.
For audiences who recently had embraced the
overt sentimentality of such films as ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
(1982) and Terms of Endearment (1983), The Return of
the Soldier was judged too psychological in subject matter
and too emotionally detached in treatment to elicit general appeal.
As a result, the film received limited distribution, playing
primarily to small theaters and art houses.
© Magill's Survey of Cinema, 1995.
Peter Travers in People,
18.ii.85.
Hem and haw if you must about the
wisdom of making a film now of Rebecca West's 1918 novel about
a shell-shocked World War I soldier's return to England and a
wife he can't remember. There are pitfalls. Director Alan (The
Hireling) Bridges approaches the novel hat in hand, as if
Masterpiece Theatre represented the last word in adventuresome
filmmaking. And too often, screenwriter Hugh Whitemore lets Dame
Rebecca's literary symbols suffocate the drama. But drama there
is.
And what success Bridges has had with his
cast! Alan Bates brings astonishing shadings to the role
of a wealthy Englishman who goes off to a war that erases all
memories except those of his youth. While his snobbish wife remains
a dim shadow, he still sees his now dowdy, sexually repressed
cousin as she was as a girl. A third woman, an innkeeper's daughter
he once loved, has since married, raised a family and become
decidedly middle class. To watch years drop off Bates' face just
at the mention of his old love's name is to see a great actor
at his peak.
 But The
Return of the Soldier is not a one-man show. Bridges has
cast three remarkable actresses against type as the women in
Bates' life. It's a big risk that pays off handsomely. As the
childhood sweetheart, headstrong Glenda Jackson turns in the
most fragile, affecting performance of her career. Through subtle
changes in her eyes, voice and posture, Jackson lets us see the
girl she was without any help from the makeup department. Her
final scene with Bates (shot at a distance from a window) is
tenderly moving.
Julie Christie, still radiantly beautiful
at 43, would have seemed a more likely choice to play the innkeeper's
daughter. Bridges, however, cast her in the bitch-wife part,
and it was an inspiration. Christie can breathe a dragon's fire
into every syllable of a line like, "She stinks of poverty
and neglect," without losing a shred of composure.
The quintessentially American Ann-Margret
would appear wrong for just about any role in this very British
film, most of all that of the spinster cousin. But Ann-Margret
has been full of surprises lately. Here she is nothing less than
fiercely splendid--all banked embers in a furnace that wants
to roar. Performances of such quality are rare in any movie season.
Having them all in one film offers an opportunity it would be
unwise to neglect.
© Time, Inc., 1985.
Alan Bates comments
...
From a 1995 interview in An Autobiography
of British Cinema
 "[Return
of the Soldier] was an underrated film ... there was one
thing that it missed: it should have had a voice-over because
the book was written in the first person. The first person was
the Ann-Margret character, who is a seemingly very sweet woman,
the victim cousin who's in love, long-suffering, but in her head
she's quite a bitch. If you don't get the voice-over, you don't
get the bitch; all you get is a very sweet woman. It lacked edge
because of that. I think if it had had that it would have been
much more successful.
"...I thought Julie was at her best,
I think Glenda was terrific in her part and Ann-Margret was wonderful,
and I wish for her sake it had just had her voice-over. I mean,
she really resented Glenda's character; while being seemingly
sweet to her, she absolutely resented her and that wasn't fair."
© Brian McFarlane, 1997
Review from State of
the Art
© 1985 by Pauline Kael
E. P. Dutton, ISBN 0-525-24369-0
Alan Bridges' film version of Rebecca West's first novel, The Return
of the Soldier, which she began writing in the winter of
1915-16 and published in 1918, when she was twenty-five, creates
a special literary universe. It gives you the feeling that you
sometimes get when you read an "advanced" novel of
the twenties, with a "daring," "modern" way
of looking at things, and are touched and charmed by its streamlined
Victorianism. Set in  1916, the movie is like a piece of intellectual
history. It re-creates an era when Freudianism was new, and when
an author might apply it to characters' lives in a spirit of
heroic revelation.
The conflict is: Should the shell-shocked,
amnesiac Captain Chris Baldry (Alan Bates), who has forgotten
the last twenty years of his life, be allowed to remain in his
boyish state of happiness, or should he be forced to confront
the truth? (It's the same theme that O'Neill wrestled with in
The Iceman Cometh: Are people strong enough to live with
"the truth?") Chris was unconsciously discontented,
the Freudian-minded doctor from London suggests, and that is
why he has blotted out all knowledge of the years of his maturity
and his marriage to the beautiful Kitty (Julie Christie). He
has regressed to the time of his greatest joy, when he was young
and in love with Margaret (Glenda Jackson), an innkeeper's daughter.
Although it takes a few minutes to yield
to this movie--to enter this past and to enjoy the psychological
and sexual dilemmas that Rebecca West posed--Julie Christie brings
you into it, by making you laugh. Kitty sits in her elegantly
decorated manor house, in its immaculate grounds, and when the
drab, middle-aged Margaret, in an ugly, practical raincoat, comes
to tell her that Chris is in a hospital, Kitty won't believe
her. She is so offended that this grubby creature could presume
to bring her news of her husband that she rings for a servant
to throw the woman out. Kitty's vanity and self-centeredness
are outrageous and unconcealed, and her snobbery is so mean-spirited
that she's funny. And she's so possessive that her husband's
having forgotten her existence seems like crazy justice. Julie
Christie is wonderful to watch; she's a ravishing camera subject
who knows how to turn her beauty against herself. With her body
caressed by soft silks, she still manages to divorce Kitty's
beauty from sexuality. She makes you feel that Kitty is ornamental
through and through, that there's no passion in her, or generosity,
either. Kitty uses her beauty as a blindfold. She's petulant
and ineducable, and so her inability to understand how Chris
can prefer the dowdy creature whom she finds physically nauseating
is a source of comedy. Kitty has lived up to her understanding
of what a wife should be, and she wants this messy inconvenience
of her husband's amnesia cleared away.
As the shabby, gentle Margaret, Glenda Jackson
has a marvellous leanness to her acting. She's completely in
character, though it's the soft of simple, good-woman role that,
reading the book, one might think unlayable--and she might be
the last actress to come to mind. When she and Chris walk together,
you can feel the bond between them, and when she sits on the
ground watching him stretched out next to her, you feel she has
given him the gift of untroubled sleep. Miscast, Jackson can
scratch on one's nerves; she can even seem to be scratching on
her own nerves. But she takes Rebecca West's literary conception
of an instinctual, loving woman and gets right down to the nub
of the character, and she does it with an east that's fairly
astounding. (Her leanness is particularly fine in her scenes
with Frank Finlay, who plays Margaret's puttering-in-the-garden
husband.) Hugh Whitemore, who adapted the novel, has written
other roles Glenda Jackson has scored in (the play and film Stevie,
the six-part "Elizabeth R" on television); here, he
takes much of the dialogue from the novel, and the novelist's
dialogue is essential, because of the film's literary ambience.
The novel has a narrator--Chris's cousin and childhood playmate
Jenny. Whitemore uses Jenny (Ann-Margret) merely as the mediator
between Kitty and Margaret. It's a colorless, thankless role--the
unselfish Jenny adores Chris, but knows that the contest is between
the two other women. At one point, Kitty, moving across a room,
kicks a little dog out of her way; a moment later, Jenny leans
over and pets it. That's her function all the way through--she
soothes ruffled feelings. What Ann-Margret is doing here as an
English spinster is a little puzzling (it has to do with the
mysteries of getting a film financed), but her bone structure
has an aristocratic quality and she acquits herself with likable
dignity.
Alan Bates has a gift for
letting us see
that the character he plays
is being acted upon.
Alan Bates has a gift for letting us see
that the character he plays is being acted upon. As Chris, he
has to carry the burden of being loved by Kitty and Jenny, and
he carries it rather heavily--which makes it work. when Chris
comes home from the hospital, he tells Kitty and Jenny, "If
I do not see Margaret Allington, I shall die." That's a
period-novel line, and Bates wouldn't get away with statements
like this if it weren't for the weight he gives them and a piteousness
that you don't laugh off. Amnesiac war heroes have been a subject
for parody for several decades (the 1942 Random Harvest
was the last straw), but Bates has an aura of middle-aged bewilderment
that saves him. He's not playing simply a shell-shocked man of
the First World War era--he's giving an authentic performance
as a shell-shocked romantic hero of that era. And when Kitty,
under duress, permits Chris to see Margaret--certain that he'll
be appalled at the sight of her frumpiness--Bates brings off
the scene in which Chris runs to Margaret and embraces her and
doesn't even notice that she looks sallow and ordinary; they
walk together with immediate intimacy and understanding.
In the novel, Jenny goes out in the woods
to find Chris and Margaret and sees them "englobed in peace
as in a crystal sphere." That's how they are in the movie,
too. And the phrase might describe the whole movie. Alan Bridges'
storytelling methods aren't much more than a thoughtful application
of television technique, but the feeling of enclosure in time
and space is just what this story needs. As Rebecca West conceived
it -- and she was writing during the First World War--it is partly
about women's attitudes toward the fighting. The title refers
not just to Chris's return to the manor but to what Margaret
and Jenny fear--that if his memory is restored he will have to
return to the trenches. (This possibility doesn't faze Kitty
in the slightest.)
 The middle-aged
Chris, who's in love in a young man's way, is, in effect, experiencing
a second childhood. As Bates plays him, he might seem perfectly
happy if it weren't for the blankness in his gray eyes. His eyes
tell us that he's lost -- that he's not fully there. And Jenny
and Margaret recognize that he can't be fully a man without his
memories of pain. (In the novel, part of that pain was his slaving
in business all those -- now forgotten -- years to pay for Kitty's
tastes, her redecoration of the house, and the upkeep on the
grounds; in the movie, he seems to have done nothing, except
go to board meetings and ride horses and play golf--perhaps so
that the film can score a point against his class.)
The movie's simplified psychology is amusingly
fragrant, and melodramatic. Ian Holm is on hand, as the lively,
gnomish London doctor who parcels out the meaning and significance
of Chris's shell shock. The film is a "civilized entertainment"--
a curiosity. It's neither great nor exciting, and much of what
makes it enjoyable is what we usually think of as peripheral:
the moderne decor in the manor house which the production designer,
Luciana Arrighi, has come up with; the jewels and clinging silks
that the costume designer, Shirley Russell, has put on Julie
Christie; the toylike automobiles; Kitty having her thick dark-blond
hair brushed, or piling it up in wonderful loose, Pre-Raphaelite
coils; even an outre witch's hat that Ann-Margaret wears -- it's
black, with spidery red embroidery running around the crown.
And the contrast between the details of Baldry Court and the
little row house where Margaret lives is like a visual essay
on class determination of taste
.But the acting saves the conception
from preciousness. (The acting is so good that Bridges and Whitemore
might have dispensed with the flashbacks to Chris and Margaret's
youthful ardor; seeing them together now tells us about their
past, and it's more stirring.) The movie isn't essentially different
from the Masterpiece Theatre adaptations of famous novels, but
it doesn't have all that drawn-out tiresomeness,and since it's
based on a little-known and minor novel, it has some freshness
to it. And the novel's dated modernity may give us pause. It
has only been a few decades since Freud and Victoria walked arm
in arm; in this material, Chris's return to reality doesn't mean
learning what his repressed feelings are and freeing himself
from a dead marriage--it means going back to being a proper husband
and a good soldier.
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