For Beta or for Worse

THE SO-CALLED New Sexual Permissiveness that arrived with the sixties provided many a self-doubting husband with a convenient, if cowardly, back exit out of marriage. In the name of "doing his own thing," and mostly because everyone else was doing it, a man could demand either divorce or separation (offering to pay alimony and child support, of course) and persuade himself that in the liberated bosom of the new society he would act out his existential errands where his embittered father had been forced to drown that restlessness in work and drink.

Predictably and pathetically, however, these crusades often took the form of silly flirtations with hippie dress, hallucinogens and other symbols of the counter-culture, and ended in the embarassing spectacle of a middle-aged refugee from the corporate rat-race (his hair probably thinning out so rapidly that a flower wouldn't even stick in it) bending some earth-mother's ear with ironic memories of his deserted wife and how she just did not understand him.

Albert Finney goes through these changes in Alpha-Beta (originally a play, adapted with minimal cinematographic flourishes for the screen). Instead of the flippant, mostly harmless satire of a foray into the "Now Generation" that, say, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas turned into, this simple film, focusing entirely on Finney's Frank Elliot and his wife, Nora, played by Rachel Roberts, jolts us with an unrelentingly realistic, though extreme, view of the psychological crisis of a not old, but not young couple who choke on all the subtle lies needed to sustain the new 'honesty."

THE FILM'S first sequence (set, as is the entire play, in the Elliots' cramped, drably decorated apartment in Liverpool) finds the greased-up Finney in the early sixties and on a rampage against the hypocrisy of working class morality--his own and that of his married drinking cronfies. The wedded worker's carnal ethic becomes rigid and depraved, Finney insists: rigid because after "a blighter shafts away until he accidentally shafts his way into marriage" his imposed sense of guilt keeps him from shafting on the side; depraved because the same man makes up for his nagging rigidity by "lusting his life away" with "dirty locker-room jokes" and blue-movies in the company of his fellow pub-hopping lusters, all in the same boat.

Finney has just turned 29--a year from 30, he notes, which will soon give way to 40--and he asks for a separation. To do what? his wife asks. "To shaft a thousand women," he cries, tearing at the colorless wallpaper that symbolizes their insipid existence. But Finney can as yet only dream about escape, and he rants and howls with frustration when he cannot muster the courage to cash in on his desire for all "the young mum'ies."

By the second and third sequence, in the late sixties and early seventies, Finney has discovered the dry look and found a mistress, and the Elliots have 'worked out' an arrangement which, both for their consciences and their pocketbooks, hardly works out. "I go through the motions as a providing father as long as you leave me to my own extra-marital devices," Finney stipulates, and the bitter humor is not lost as he agrees to go on as a couple "provided we stay out of each other's personal affairs."

Roberts, meanwhile, who held a barely comforting but nevertheless upper hand in the early sixties, when Finney could only rankle at his own inhibitions, must now suffer the humiliation of seeing her husband swing free and appear, at least, to be having a grand old time. The director, Anthony Page, attaches time tags to each of the film's sequences without pushing the point, but the message comes across nonetheless: in the period after marital hypocrisy had been declared taboo but before women began to really assert their rights, a housewife who had surrendered her identity to her husband faced a cruel void when the object of her devotion packed his bags.

E.A. Whitehead's powerful script gives Roberts and Finney both the concentration of focus (no kids or neighbors barging in to tear them from each other's throats) and the depth of antagonism needed for tour de force performances. And Page has the good sense to refrain from superfluous footage and to let their acting say it all. (One shudders to imagine the possibilities: newsreel shots of the maturing Beatles with each jump in time, perhaps, or a montage of their interspliced faces for some misspent Bergmanesque ambiguity.)

Roberts manages the sort of homely but vulnerable manner that might conceivably make a brash young knight eager to wed and protect her, then live to regret the day. Finney, the best he's been since Tom Jones, projects all the lying charm of that role, but with more blushes, blusterings and side-ways glances that belie his conscience-free self-confidence. And because the script faithfully represents the tensions created by the times rather than playing on the assumptions of the sixties, this psychological guerrilla war still rings true and poignant, whereas the same theme in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with its dependence on now defunct fascination with 'the games people play' and the hypocritical humanism of academe, now seems dated.

The film, if not the war, ends at the outset of this decade. Finney has begun to chafe and drink under the pressures of holding on to his mistress and landing a higher-level job, and now looks forward to a day when "people will stay together because they really want to." Roberts has become almost catatonic, neglects her housework and her appearance, and stoops, desperately, to the last ploy she can think of to blackmail Finney back: "If you walk out that door," she threatens, "I'll klll myself, and the kids too." But when he goes she pours the three glasses of Nembutal she had prepared in with the rest of the unwashed dishes and then... well, the film never tells us.

This conclusion, inconclusive and yet fast on the heels of the ultimate skirmish of psychological cruelty, leaves us with half a film, for one presumes that after throwing her hands up at suicide Mrs. Elliot will have to come to terms. The portrait of her, ending here, strikes one as perverse and, although meant to arouse sympathy, pretty unsympathetic. The children, at least, might provide Roberts with a vocation and some joy--even Finney has grown to appreciate them, and remarks perfectly "I'm happier with them because I'm happier without them." Yet she declares herself ready to drag them along with her in her one last mocktragic threat to hound Finney's conscience.

One more sequence would have rendered this desolate tale more humane and, I think, more complete. Perhaps not the sort of rediscovered affection that caps off Portrait of a Marriage, but maybe a glimpse into the middle seventies when through, say, a feminist sharing group, Mrs. Elliot would have the chance to communicate her despair with other ex-wives in the same aimless, professionless bind. One hopes so, at least, because she can't sit and stare at the symbolic wallpaper forever.