The Times (20/Sep/1966) - Havoc and destruction over taking off a few pounds
(c) The Times (20/Sep/1966)
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, W. Somerset Maugham
Havoc and destruction over taking off a few pounds
FROM OUR TELEVISION CRITIC
No one might ever go on a diet after seeing The Fat Woman's Tale last night in Granada's Plays of Married Life. From the title I had expected something impishly sardonic like Somerset Maugham's Three Fat Women of Antibes, but Fay Weldon's picture of havoc and destruction when a couple decide to take off a few pounds was neither amusing nor credible.
On the second day the husband, having passed for a contented "one woman man", was making love to his secretary, moaning: "I am hungry and you are peaches and cream"; and the wife was nagging the daily help, to whom the house had become like a morgue.
The scenes between husband and wife, rising to a frenzy of invective, even physical assault, were well in line with the apparent bent of television plays to portray the matrimonial state with tooth and claw. This example seemed to go beyond any reasonable extreme. If there was a moral, it must have been not to start slimming. Anyway, the wife, having left home, is positively wolfing food when the husband arrives to patch things up, but after all the hurt and devastation little seems to be left to them — except to eat. If they had to say much things, I suppose June Tobin and David Langton in the two main parts made the most of them; but how better they would have been left unsaid.
Alfred Hitchcock, speaking with the air of faint astonishment that he brings to has films, gave B.B.C. 1 a beguiling half hour by discussing some of his secrets of suspense with Philip Jenkinson. Extracts from some of the films were effectively used to make his points — one, for instance, that it has become a cliche to depict dreams in blurred outlines, which for him was not true.
Taking a scene in a mill from one of his spy films — it recalled the whole story — he said he made it a strict rule never to put characters in a setting unless the setting itself served some dramatic purpose. By dint of many other examples he showed that the most important thing in suspense is to give the audience information, without which it could not be expected to become anxious. Why, he asked, was an audience invariably more anxious about the wrong-doer than the discoverer ?
