All the Right Noises (1970)

All the Right Noises is a 1970 British movie written and directed by Gerry O’Hara. It could be described as a romantic/sex melodrama, with the emphasis on the melodrama.

Len (Tom Bell) works in the theatre as a lighting technician. He’s 32 and married with two kids. One night, after the show, he asks Val (Olivia Hussey) to the pub for a drink. Then he does the gentlemanly thing and escorts her home. They indulge in some reasonably heavy flirting on the train journey to her home. Val is lively and vivacious and very pretty and seems interested in him. He’s definitely interested in her. He intends to escort her to her door, they have to cut across a park to get there, and they stop in the park and get to know each other better. They get to know each other extremely well indeed.

Len feels a bit guilty, especially when he gets home and his actress wife Joy (Judy Carne) wants to make love.

The next day Len has a bit of a shock when he runs into Val into the street. She’s wearing her school uniform. She admits that she’s fifteen. Len realises that he’s getting into dangerous waters but Val is so cute and bubbly and he’s hooked on her. And she’s hooked on him. She doesn’t care that he is married.

This could be a tale of an unhappily married man finding love with another woman but that’s not the case here. Len’s wife Joy is very pretty, very easy to get along with, likes sex and is totally devoted to her husband. If she’s not the perfect wife then she’s as close to it as any reasonable man could ever expect to find. But Len is obsessed with Val.

When the theatre company goes on tour he knows he shouldn’t go. If he does then he and Val will continue their affair. But of course he does go.

Len comes up with a brilliant idea. While Joy is away in Majorca shooting a TV commercial he’ll move Val into their flat. Having sex with your girlfriend in the bed you share with your wife shows real class.

Of course the affair gets messy. And of course the day comes when Val announces that she’s missed her period this month.

This is essentially another in the long line of 1960s British kitchen sink dramas, with the same stifling atmosphere of seediness, despair and hopelessness. You know that if any of the characters try to bring some joy into their lives life will just kick them in the teeth. If they try to make their lives better they will fail. If, God forbid, they have sex they will pay for it. British film-makers in the 60s loved to wallow in misery, especially film-makers with pretensions to making Serious Films. If they hoped to make arty films they took care to make them even more miserable.

This movie has that air of defeat and resignation. The characters hope for very little, and usually they don’t even get that.

You have to wonder what Val sees in Len. I suppose he’s not bad looking (not being a woman I’m not qualified to judge) but he’s lazy, he has no ambitions, he’s irritable, he lacks charm, he isn’t amusing and he isn’t intelligent. He’s married with two kids and he isn’t going to leave his wife. He doesn’t have a sexy bad boy vibe. He’s not a producer so he won’t be able to help her in her career. Maybe it’s just that she’s so young that she’s flattered to have a grown-up man, any grown-up man, take an interest in her. And maybe she’s flattered that he obviously wants to go to bed with her. She’s pretty and charming and she could do a whole lot better but perhaps she doesn’t realise that.

She seems to have no actual end in view. She knows he won’t leave his wife. She knows there’s no future for their affair, but she wants him anyway. Len has never in his life given any thought to the future and in this case he can’t think beyond wanting to sleep with Val.

I guess Tom Bell’s surly performance as Len is what the director wanted. Olivia Hussey is rather charming as Val. She was a bit older than the character she plays but she was still a teenager and she’s convincingly naïve and impulsive and we can’t help liking her. Judy Carne is good as Joy. She was a fine and underrated actress but Joy is a badly underwritten character who doesn’t offer an actress much to work with. The whole relationship between Len and Joy is undeveloped. There’s nothing obviously wrong with their marriage on the surface and we don’t really know why Len wants to play round. Perhaps the hole point of the movie is that Len is such a hopeless loser that he doesn’t know the answer to that question himself.

In case we’re not depressed enough already we get to meet Len’s father, a broken-down alcoholic loser who ruined his wife’s life. I guess we’re expected to see the old man as a glimpse of Len twenty years down the track.

Although the subject matter is adultery this is definitely not an exploitation movie. There’s no nudity. Well, Joy does get a nude scene but it’s shot in total darkness to make sure that British cinema-goers were not exposed to the horrors of the sight of a naked woman. The sex scenes would get a G rating today.

One major problem is that there’s no sexual heat at all in the Len-Val relationship. We just don’t buy the idea that they’re motivated by sexual obsession but there’s absolutely nothing else to their relationship and there’s no romantic fire either so it all seems a bit mysterious. Perhaps, given Val’s age, it was felt that the sex angle needed to be downplayed but it’s downplayed so much that the movie seems a bit pointless.

The BFI DVD/Blu-Ray combo offers a reasonable but far from stunning transfer.

All the Right Noises is, like the lives of the characters it portrays, a rather disappointing and depressing experience.