Battle of Britain

By JAY COCKS

ALPHA BETA

Directed by ANTHONY PAGE Screenplay by E.A. WHITEHEAD

In Liverpool, in a house on Highgate Avenue, Frank and Nora Elliot pick at each other like vultures who cannot wait for death to sate their appetites. They tear away while the flesh is still warm.

Alpha Beta covers a decade in the Elliots' marriage, starting in the early 1960s on the day of Frank's 29th birthday and ending after their separation, with Nora first threatening, then retreating from suicide. Alpha Beta was originally a successful play by Scenarist Whitehead, and its three episodes still seem very much like short, jagged acts. The whole feeling of this small, stormy movie is enclosed, constricted. No effort has been made to enlarge the action of the play, but the theatrical qualities of the writing are not emphasized either. Director Anthony Page stages most of the action in the Elliot living room, usually having it photographed with a hand-held camera so that Alpha Beta has the look of some wrenchingly intimate verite documentary.

Ritual Slaughter. What is wrong here--very wrong--is the dreary familiarity of the theme, the reworking, still again, of English working-class desperation, the sour brutality of the language, which often sounds too toplofty and aphoristic for the people speaking it ("I'm an apostolic alcoholic." "Marriage is one of the few surviving forms of ritual slaughter").

The cast consists, in its entirety, of the original London stage company: Rachel Roberts, an actress of daunting strength, who works hard to give Nora some of the sympathetic understanding the author neglected; and Albert Finney, a prodigious actor who is masterly at containing and then portioning out his power. His Frank is a creation of fierce bluster and desperate anger. Even while he is railing, Finney can convey --in the sidelong unease of a glance, a little twitch of uncertain anxiety--the small, sabotaging currents of helplessness and terror. Jay Cocks

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