The Fox & Sweet November

Sandy Dennis, with her wiggly mouth and widdershins acting style, might as well have a curl in the middle of her forehead. Because when she is bad, she is horrid. In one of her two most recent roles, she is excellent, though the movie goes sour anyway. In the other, it is hard to tell which is more ludicrous--Sandy or the film.

D. H. Lawrence was a paladin of explicit sex in a world still impressed by censors; he might be surprised to see how his novella The Fox had to be fixed up for 1968 movie audiences. Sex had to be put in rather than taken out. Director Mark Rydell has seen fit to heat his movie up with three gratuitous physical set-tos--girl and man in hunting cabin, girl and girl in bed, girl and herself in bathroom. The result is slick, sick psychological melodrama.

Two girls are off by themselves trying to run a chicken farm in Canada with a lot of snow and icicles. Jill (Dennis) is a fidgety fuss-budget with a scrambled face and a psyche to match. March (Anne Heywood) is cool, competent and controlled--the one who makes the decisions and mends the fences and blasts away with a shotgun at the red fox who regularly raids the chicken yard. Into this twitchy domesticity comes Paul (Keir Dullea), a merchant seaman on leave who has arrived to visit his grandfather, the deceased owner of the farm. A take-over type, he quickly gets himself invited to stay, while Jill giggles flirtatiously and March watches, wary and aloof. But it is March he wants--to her grateful astonishment and Jill's bitter chagrin.

Paul's courtship catalyzes the lesbian relationship between the two girls, and for a while the triangle is a well-established and valid dramatic situation. But the creaky, mechanical ending (for which Lawrence deserves the blame) is a culpable copout. The actors deserve better. Anne Heywood, despite her non-derangeable makeup, is suitably tense and sensual, while Keir Dullea at least looks remarkably like a fox in a henhouse. And Sandy Dennis makes the neurotic Jill fully as enraging and pathetic as she should be.

Sweet November is a little love sto ry that should be fey, funny, touching and bittersweet. Instead it is foolish, lugubrious, sloppy and saccharine. Flashing her little half-smiles in all directions, Sandy is supposed to be a delicious young thing who picks up men and takes them home to share her bed for a month at a time in order to alleviate their hang-ups, or whatever. Anthony Newley is supposed to be an upright box manufacturer who becomes Mr. November.

Lots of self-consciously kooky things happen in Sandy's kooky apartment, with its kooky metal staircase and the kooky neighbors running in and out. By the end of November, of course, the two are very much in love, but still Newley has to leave at midnight on the 30th as per agreement. Why? The truth is that she has some unspecified fatal illness and doesn't want him around "when it happens." So out he goes into the snow, while Sandy bravely and inanely tells her next client how beautiful it is going to be in December. And how jejune in January.

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