Losey as producer and director and Pinter as screenwriter working together to adapt a novel by Nicholas Mosley. Amazing how little is said and how much is told. But in general the dialogue is used, and Losey's infinitely subtle direction of playing and timing is used, to show character changing with experience and unhappiness. The sequence in which Losey and Pinter draw the threads together is a long, lazy summer Sunday. And beneath all this the stabbing instincts for destruction, which crack suddenly into the open across the supper table and send everyone to bed drunk and miserable.
Every line wins of yields an inch of ground.
Pauses are no more innocent of battle advantage that the hideous Christmas lulls of modern wars, and men's sensations of immortal love are as restless and territorial as the instinct of badgers. Any duologue is always one between agent and victim, with the roles switching swiftly, and the desperate lines themselves are perhaps spoken chiefly to try to establish whose role is which. The mute women in Pinter's works who look like men's suffering objects are often the most powerful combatants of all.