Ordinary & Extraordinary

The Family Way. In England's North Country, a young couple spend their wedding night at his parents' place. The boy (Hywel Bennett) has a skin even thinner than the walls of the bedroom, and as his loutmouthed father (John Mills) fusses with a chamber pot next door, he finds himself unable to consummate the marriage. When their honeymoon plans fall through, the couple stay on in the house, and Bennett remains incapacitated. "One doesn't miss what one's never had," the bride (Hayley Mills) assures him. But a month later, she miserably confides her troubles to her mother--and overnight the truth is known all over their drab industrial town.

From the raw material of this domestic calamity, the producer-director team of John and Roy Boulting have managed to make a situation comedy of piquant delicacy. The camera, like a sensitive visitor, never overstays its welcome when the newlyweds are together. The script, by Bill Naughton (Alfie), has a hundred opportunities to snigger but passes them all by with a warm smile. Moreover, The Family Way often evokes the serious undertones of a D. H. Lawrence story, as it explores the couple's life and the sexual attitudes that lie beneath their parents' working-class platitudes.

"Everything will coom raght," both sides insist, but as the parents exchange confidences, it becomes obvious that Oedipus and Electra complexes lurk in corners of both households. At the film's finale, everything does indeed coom raght for the young couple, who go off on their own, though behind them they leave four unhappily married parents, whose permanent frustrations are now a little deeper.

Playing her first grown-up role, Hayley Mills is outstanding in a cast of seasoned performers. Hayley's father-in-law on film is her real-life father, John Mills; beery-voiced and bleary-eyed, he once again demonstrates his ability to breathe life into any character he plays. This time he gives a brilliant full-length portrait of a proletarian father who tries to reach his children but who cannot touch them without giving hurt. At the end, when his son asks his advice for the first time, the old man breaks down and cries. The scene might have been merely maudlin. Mills makes it still another moment of truth in an extraordinary film composed entirely of ordinary people.

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