Dead Lucky; An Englishman Abroad; Unexplained Laughter

BFS Limited, through its subsidiary, Prime Video, is making a handful of made-for-television productions, which originally aired on the BBC, available stateside for the first time. Dead Lucky, based on Ruth Rendell's Lake of Darkness is a nail-biting suspenser starring Nicholas Farrell as Martin Urban, a bachelor who receives a tip from an old friend and wins 150,000 pounds in a football pool. Martin decides--partially for tax reasons--to give half the money away to needy acquaintances. When a mysterious woman named Francesca (Harriet Bagnall) comes into his life, Martin falls head over heels. Yet as the relationship progresses, Martin becomes more and more confused about his new love's "mystery" life, and viewers begin to suspect that Francesca is leading Martin into a major con game. When a subplot, involving a hitman named Finn, dovetails into the main story, Martin unwittingly becomes both a victim and a killer. Mystery fans will enjoy Rendell's superb plotting, and director Barbara Rennie gets good performances out of the principals, and maintains a great sense of dark foreboding which hangs over the film right up to the explosive final revelatory encounter between Martin and Finn. An excellent entertainment. Highly recommended. An Englishman Abroad, a multi-award winning film, is based on a true story revolving around a meeting between British diplomat turned Russian spy Guy Burgess (Alan Bates) and actress Coral Browne (played by Browne herself). Directed by John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy, The Falcon and the Snowman, Pacific Heights), the tale is set in Moscow, circa 1958. Burgess, attending a traveling British troupe's performance of Hamlet, becomes sick between acts, and avails himself of Hamlet's mother's (Browne) dressing room wash basin. Mumbling apologies, he waits until she leaves and then steals her soap, cigarettes, and liquor. Browne later receives an invitation to lunch and a request that she bring a tape measure. After a frustrating morning on the streets of Moscow trying to find Burgess's address and getting no help from British embassy officials, she finally trades her scarf for information and a Muscovite leads her to Burgess's ratty apartment. Burgess and Browne have a remarkable conversation, and she measures him for a new suit, promising to visit his tailor upon her return to London. Bates is wonderful as Burgess, a witty, broken homosexual, who followed the counsel of his political heart, and is now a displaced person in Soviet society (he tells Browne that he would be happy to take her out to lunch, but he isn't allowed to leave his apartment until 4 p.m.). An Englishman Abroad is a moving, low-key film about a forgotten man living out the winter of his discontent--yet determined to the last to remain a British gentleman. Recommended. Unexplained Laughter, based on Alice Thomas Ellis's satirical novel, stars Diana Rigg (best known as Emma Peel on The Avengers) as Lydia, a British writer who takes a holiday in Wales with her new friend Betty (Elaine Page), following her discovery that her lover Finn has been philandering in Greece. Tossing off witty putdowns of the male race, Lydia is initially content to drink in the beautiful countryside and lick her wounds, but the social politics of the Welsh valley community attracts her attention. In particular, Lydia is interested in the Lewis family. Wife Elizabeth (Joanna David) it turns out is being more than friendly with Dr. Wyn H. Richards (Robert East), while husband Howell remains tightlipped about the whole thing. Howell's sister Angharad, a teenage mute, harbors a deep resentment over the affair (and the film plants the idea that she might have been raped by the doctor), and she breaks Elizabeth's things and draws obscene graffiti on the neighboring rocks depicting liaisons between either the Doctor and Elizabeth or the Doctor and herself. Lydia finds out about the drawings and invites all the principals on a picnic where they are certain to see Angharad's art. As the film progresses, and the darker elements of the story come to the fore, Lydia's laughter and petty machinations begin to look downright cruel--and we begin to pay less attention to the clever acerbic sting of her remarks, and more to the fact that this is a vicious little film that wants to have its ha-ha's and its sordidness too. It doesn't wash. Beyond the sparkling quality of some of Ellis's better lines of dialogue, Rigg is tiresome as Lydia, Page is unbelievably daft as Betty, and the rest of the characters are all one-dimensional stick figures. Not recommended. (R. Pitman)