Orphan of the Sexual Storm

The New Woman was born in Ibsen's inkwell. When Nora slammed the door on hubby and the kiddies in the last scene of A Doll's House, wives all over the Western world began mentally packing their suitcases. The idea behind Nora's leaving was lofty. Woman was no longer to be a possession, a commodity, a glorified nursemaid, a kept dilettante on the sidelines of the world's imposing work. She would forge her own identity and earn something called "respect." The amusing thing about this, as G. K. Chesterton once pointed out, was that "a million women announced their intention to be free and promptly began taking dictation."

That was the old feminism, and its intent was not really to eliminate man but to reduce the power of his pocketbook. The new feminism that underlies a soppy little fable called Thank You All Very Much derives from the praying mantis. Man--a brief biological interlude--is to be casually discarded after procreative use. A girl can have her baby and keep it in single bliss. Sufficient unto the self is the self.

This rather sad, silly and sterile proposition is seen through a teary blur of bravery. Thank You might have been subtitled Orphan of the Sexual Storm. Seduced, pregnant and very much alone, Sandy Dennis, an arch-valiant London waif, decides to have her baby anyway. She wouldn't dream of darkening her parents' door, and they have left for Africa anyway. She is too proud to tell the father (Ian McKellen), a BBC TV announcer who was only with her for one gravid night. Apparently she takes a dim view of his husbandly potential in any case, though she likes to gaze at him wistfully on the telly.

Pregnancies last nine months, and the film is paced to match. The only fire that the film stokes is under the bureaucratically callous procedures of British welfare medics, a group that seems to inspire a special nausea in Scriptwriter Margaret Drabble. Sandy Dennis has curtailed some of her facial acrobatics, but she still speaks some of her lines as if she were blowing them through her gums. Just to fill the new feminists' cup of joy, Sandy's baby is a girl.

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