Spoiled Spinster

Two Loves (M-G-M). Laurence Harvey follows his square Lithuanian jaw right through Shirley MacLaine's bedroom window, grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her hard: "Are you so happy sleeping alone?"

"I'm so used to it," croaks Shirley.

"Coward! Coward!" brays Larry, and withdraws to his bachelor lair, sulking that Shirley is all "thick Puritan malted American milk, not a woman atall."

Rather than a malted, Shirley is really a marm--a frustrated, febrile virgin teaching a grist of young Maoris in New Zealand, the homeland of Author Sylvia Ashton-Warner, on whose literary masterpiece, Spinster, the film is based--or, better, grounded. For all that was artless power, poetry and humor in the book is now arty, prosy and plodding.

Where the book called up images of lovely backwoods flora and fauna, the film has the artsy-craftsy exotica of Trader Vic's. The book's Anna Vorontosov was an interestingly unbalanced woman whose salvation came from the joyous dangers she found in teaching; the movie's Anna alternates between being cute and fighting for her virtue. One moment she plods through a witless musical routine about Pogo, the next she is braining Hero Harvey for ripping open her blouse (with cretinous whinnies of "Open sesame!"). And where it was right for the hero to blow his brains out in the book, it seems pure melodrama for him to rage off in the film to obloquy and oblivion on his trusty green motorcycle.

"I've committed horrible crimes," he confesses before he goes, "but the worst crime of all is me." Possibly, but next to Actor Harvey--who acts with the strutting, stagy bravura of Early Barrymore --come the screenwriter (Ben Maddow), the director (Charles Walters), and the author's agent who made the deal in the first place.

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