Rags to Wretchedness

Five Finger Exercise (Columbia], adapted from the prizewinning play by Britain's Peter Shaffer, is a perspicuous and painful study of a family that has risen from rags to wretchedness.

As the picture begins, the family arrives for the summer at its seaside estate in California. Father Harrington (Jack Hawkins), an immigrant boy who came up the hard way in the furniture business, is a narrow-eyed, loud-mouthed merchant who slaps his lips together when he eats, picks his teeth elaborately when he's done, thinks TV is the greatest thing since the sofabed, and looks uneasy when people talk about Sophocles' Electra--he figures maybe it's an airplane or something. Mother Harrington (Rosalind Russell) is a charming monster of self-deception who married father because he looked safe, loathes him for his vulgarity, stays on "for the children's sake," hates herself for wasting her life, takes her hatred out on her husband, and compensates her unhappiness by cultural climbing that doesn't always make the grade--she remembers Electra as a play about a king who screamed while he put out his own eyes.

Family life at the Harringtons' is one long parental tug-of-war in which the children serve as the rope. The daughter (Annette Gorman), a sunny child just turning into her teens, seems able to stand the strain. But the son (Richard Beymer), an unstable boy in his first year at Harvard, starts to come apart as mother tries to get him away from father, and father tries to get him away from Harvard and into the furniture business.

The crisis develops as, one by one, the members of this sick little clan discharge their tensions into a fragile lightning rod, a sensitive young tutor (Maximilian Schell), who longs almost pathetically to please his "new family." In return, the man of the house ignores him brutally, the son despises him vocally, the mother starts shamelessly breathing down his neck. In the end, they drive him to attempt suicide, and in his glassy eyes they see the death they have been living.

The film is sometimes talky, sometimes slow, but the acting is always careful, and Daniel (Butterfield 8) Mann's direction is intermittently inspired. Exercise is not a profound examination of family life, but it effectively explains that all too often home is where the hurt is.

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