False Alarm

"I thought I told you never to come here," barks the man at his mistress. The line is a cliche, but then so is the situation. A British salesman, Steve Howard (Rod Steiger), picks up a snippy, nubile hitchhiker named Ella (Judy Geeson). In a little black notebook, Ella has been rating her loves the way a teacher marks her pupils. After a night in a Birmingham hotel, she grants the salesman an A minus, a mark that prompts him to give his wife a D.

Howard blithely offers to make Ella his weekend resort, but she is not content to be "a quick bash." Instead, she manages to find his home. At the doorway, all wide eyes and teary voice, she introduces herself to Mrs. Howard (Claire Bloom) as a poor, pregnant runaway stranded far from home. But 3 Into 2 Won't Go, as the title says, and the menage `a trois quickly proves insupportable. The truth is that even when it was a menage `a deux, the Howards were a loveless, childless couple. At the first signs of offspring, Howard decides to abandon his bed and board to run off with the girl. When Ella's alarm turns out false, so do the marriage, the liaison--and the poses of all the principals.

Under Peter Hall's restrained direction, Bloom and Steiger prove adept as stiff-upper-lip types. They are given fervent support by Geeson and by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. But no troupe could be expert enough to elevate 3 Into 2 from its confined and pallid plot.

Sad to say, the film will probably be noted less for its deliberate ironies than for its unconscious one. Last month, after seven years of marriage, Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom were divorced.

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