Union on Strike

Two for the Road. In rural England, a husband and wife gaze out of their sports car at a bride and groom emerging from a church. She sighs: "They don't look very happy." He snaps: "Why should they? They just got married."

In that exchange, Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney sum up the film that follows: an adult bedtime story of a couple whose union is constantly going on strike. Abandoning the Givenchy school and the elfin cool, Hepburn is surprisingly good as a Virginia Woolf-cub who has earned her share of scars in the jungle war between the sexes. As her mate, a self-centered architect, Finney is not so fortunate, and seems curiously unsympathetic in helping to turn his marriage into a fray-for-all. Happily, whenever the strife skitters closer to tragedy than comedy, Director Stanley Donen takes the viewer's eye off the brawl by ushering in William Daniels and Eleanor Bron parodying a WASPish American and his shrewish wife, or Claude Dauphin, whose jet-set bore is a perfect putdown.

Frederic Raphael, who won a 1965 Academy Award for Darling, has written a script that makes up in salt what it lacks in plot, although his dialogue, as Don Marquis once put it, sometimes merely strokes a platitude until it purrs like an epigram ("The only thing that fits into a pigeonhole is a pigeon"). Flashing back and forth through twelve years of togetherness and apartheid, Director Donen makes sure that this particular Road never quite reaches a dead end. In the final moments, Hepburn and Finney, reconciled, look lovingly at each other in the car. He sighs, "Bitch." She snaps, "Bastard."

In its own perverse way, it is a happy ending, and one with a moral: a husband and wife always have a chance to make a go of it as long as they can laugh at a single private joke--even if the joke is marriage.

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