Obtuse Triangle

By J. C.

THE PUBLIC EYE

Directed by CAROL REED

Screenplay by PETER SHAFFER

After hearing but a few notes over the car radio, he can identify Mahler's Fifth Symphony. He can also quote Aldous Huxley. His paramour is both impressed and baffled. "Who's Aldous Huxley?" she asks.

It doesn't seem that such a relationship can endure, although we are made to endure every cloying moment of it in The Public Eye. He (Michael Jayston) is a highly paid English tax accountant; she (Mia Farrow), a slightly wilted California flower child marooned in London en route home from Katmandu. They first meet in a restaurant, where she is a waitress, when she accidentally spills chicken with caramel sauce all over his proper blue suit. She is breezily apologetic. He is unaccountably enchanted.

After the wedding she begins to realize that her Pygmalion is rather stuffy, and he sees that his Galatea is resisting the finer things he is trying to offer her. One night he comes home from a hard day juggling tax forms to discover her curled up with Madame Bovary. "I feel so sorry for her because she's trapped," she announces. Not long thereafter, he hires a private investigator (Topol) to check on her constancy.

As the detective follows her on his motor scooter from double-feature horror films to the dolphin pond in Windsor Park, he becomes infatuated. He is something of a pixy himself, a regular Zorba the Dick. He consumes huge quantities of yogurt, munches on endless macaroons, and makes a lot of funny faces. Now it is the wife who is unaccountably enchanted.

The detective finally rights this wretched triangle by taking over the husband's tax business, lending him his supply of macaroons and hurrying him out to follow his wife around the streets of London and win her heart again. The film would be a laughable travesty were it not directed by Carol Reed, who made such superb films as The Third Man, Odd Man Out and Outcast of the Islands. That makes it a sad travesty.

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