A Novel Affair

This is one of the many films that must have sounded marvelous at the script writers' conference: a novelist, who has a husband and an Italian chauffeur, writes about three people very much like herself, her husband, and her chauffeur. Since she is a popular novelist, her creations are romanticized exaggerations--the woman becomes emotional, the husband picturesque and tyrannical, and the chauffeur passionate. The real chauffeur reads her novel and tries to make fiction come true.

But reality is not fiction. The real chauffeur is frustrated in every way. No sleeping with the mistress, no murdering the master--not in this pragmatic world, the British comedy soberly suggests.

Pity.

Some of the woeful inadequacies of life when compared to fiction are made very funny, but the film is not the neat satirical gem that it could be, and for a sad reason. The two sequences of events, both acted out for use with mild ingenuity by the same cast in the same setting, are too similar. Although an amusing technical touch is added by filming the reality in black and white and the fiction in technicolor, the scriptwriters' reality is often too close to the novelist's fiction, and both are often obvious.

But there are touches. Margaret Leighton's face, for instance, is an excellent playground of contrasts, especially when she is acting the real novelist, puzzled by passion. Moreover, and most fortunately, Ralph Richardson acts her husband. He is casually perfect, and finds a flourish even in the stiff upper lip of, "There's only one thing more to say. Apparently I haven't made it sufficiently clear. I happen to love you very much."

Lady Chatterly's lover, the chauffeur, is played by a handsome dolt who may be trying to be funny.

With A Novel Affair, two long shorts are played off against one another--one displaying the considerable versatility of the British air industry, and the other, Pablo Casals. Impressive as the needle-nosed bursts of speed are, Casals is part of a better world.