Waris Hussein’s earnest 1969 movie, adapted by Margaret Drabble from her own novel The Millstone, is a London-set drama about a young woman who has difficulties with men while researching a PhD in English literature – and as a result we get some tremendously nostalgic shots of the British Museum round reading room, when it was still a working library. American star Sandy Dennis puts on a stage-school English accent to play Rosamund, the graduate student who has well-to-do but insufferable bien pensant liberal parents, the kind of people who, as she explains to someone, “let the charlady sit down to dine with us, that kind of nonsense”.
Rosamund finds herself alone in her parents’ London flat while they are away doing good works in Africa and she exchanges brittle, knowing dialogue with chaps who take her out on dates: Joe (Michael Coles) and Roger (John Standing). However, she is only attracted to an oddly camp television newsreader called George, played with bizarre twinkly eyed condescension by Ian McKellen. (The 60s setting and the air of sexual loucheness put me in mind of McKellen’s performance as John Profumo in Michael Caton-Jones’s Scandal.) Rosamond loses her virginity in a single, unsatisfactory sexual encounter with George; she gets pregnant and resolves to keep the baby despite objections from family, friends and nurses.
