The Strange Affair

Director: David Greene
Writers: Eve Greene (writer), Stanley Mann (writer)
Cast: Michael York, Jeremy Kemp, Susan George, Jack Watson, George A. Cooper

Gilbert and Sullivan's kidding and caroling that "a policeman's lot is not a happy one" is no more Victorian than the decidedly serious, contemporary and aptly titled The Strange Affair.

As a melodramatic study of the rough, often sleazy life of the London bobby and plainclothes man, it may succeed at being tough, violent, sexy and strange, but it does so within the bounds of a standard cops-and-robbers-at-work theme, already made familiar through such better examples of the genre as "Detective Story."

The British troupe gives us a Cook's Tour of London, bombed-out and new, that vividly abets the activities of the mod, way-out and criminal characters who crash in and out of the overly naive, tyro-bobby-hero's short, unhappy tour of duty. But while police routine is professionally slick and believable, constable-recruit Strange, obviously educated, hardly appears the man to become trapped continuously in bizarre destructive circumstances so contrived as to be hardly acceptable.

Trouble seeks Strange out when he becomes embroiled (for no real reason) with a gang of dope smugglers led by a cashiered detective and his two, plug-ugly sons. It hits him again when a wise, curvaceous, concupiscent teenybopper leads him into an affair (with a good measure of explicit nude scenes) surreptitiously filmed by her pornographer aunt and uncle, who are unbilled but amusing.

He is maimed in vicious style (also without much reason). And his final undoing comes through a detective sergeant, paranoic on the subject of crooked policemen and those sneering dope peddlers, who uses the pornographic evidence to force him into an unsuccessful attempt to frame them.

If the muscular and sexy goings-on are excessive and irrational on occasion, some of the principals lend credible, physical support to their characterizations. Michael York, seen here previously in "Smashing Time," is properly personable and confused as the harried Strange. Susan George, a comparative newcomer who is pert, snub-nosed and pretty, makes eroticism a pleasure, even if her sudden switch from promiscuity to Strange's everloving girl, remains a mystery. Jeremy Kemp is convincingly neurotic as the indomitable sergeant and Jack Watson, David Glaisyer and Richard Vanstone, are suitably rugged and implacably rough in exemplifying successful nepotism in the narcotics trade.

They all prove that "The Strange Affair" is where the sensational action is, even if it is entirely strange and unbelievable.

Review by A. H. Weiler
New York Times Review

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