Rack of Lamb

By JAY COCKS

LADY CAROLINE LAMB

Directed by ROBERT BOLT Screenplay by ROBERT BOLT

This liberally embellished biography of a woman who played muse to the Romantic era cannot really be called good, but it certainly is funny. The question is whether Writer-Director Robert Bolt achieved the hilarity by design or accident. His previous film work--for example, the scripts for those David Lean dirigibles Doctor Zhivago and Ryan's Daughter--has been pretty stiff and sobersided; silly, perhaps, but politely so. Here, making his debut as a film director, Bolt comes off rather like a De Mille with a university degree.

Rather too reserved for camp, Lady Caroline Lamb entertains exactly because Bolt struggles to do something serious. He gives the disconcerting feeling of having wanted to say something gravely personal, an impression strongly reinforced by the presence of his wife, Sarah Miles, in the title role.

Miles portrays Lady Caroline like a seasick naiad. She is married to that steadfast politician William Lamb (Jon Finch), who is later to become Lord Melbourne, no thanks to her. Caroline conducts a mad love affair with Lord Byron (Richard Chamberlain), submitting eagerly to such ignominious charades as playing Nubian slave to his surly prince. She thereby offers herself as a willing victim to the Romantic Agony, not to mention the subsequent shame, strife and scandal.

Lapses of taste are far more frequent than distortions of history, although Bolt can bend a fact with the best. Lamb's temporary political disgrace, for example, had less to do with his wife's indiscretions than with parliamentary machinations, and Lady Caroline had several other heated liaisons subsequent to the one with Byron. In the Bolt version, such niceties must yield to the demands of melodrama.

The film opens, fittingly enough, with Miles thundering across the countryside on horseback, and ends with her dying on her back in a belvedere bathed in moonlight. In between, there is a fair number of sharp performances surrounding her. Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, who must both be on permanent call for big-budget costume dramas, appear respectively as the Duke of Wellington and King George III, and behave -- correctly -- as if they had just found themselves in the middle of an elaborate revue.

Finch is suitably staunch as William, and Chamberlain contributes an amusingly eccentric interpretation of Byron as a pretty narcissist who arranges his curls carefully before entering a ballroom. Margaret Leighton, full of delicate malice, is superb as William's mother. "Your wife is a mass of nothing, Willie," she announces to her son, as if she had just concluded an elementary scientific investigation with a magnifying glass and a tweezer. Not a completely unfair appraisal of the movie, either.

--:Jay Cocks

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