AFTER nearly six decades, this is the second filming of Terence Rattigan’s stage play about passion and infidelity.

Terence Davies’ film begins with Hester, a judge’s wife, preparing to suicide. She fails. Battle of Britain fighter pilot Freddie (Tom Hiddleston) induces a sexual epiphany in her (by implication, not full-on bedroom cavorting). Flash

backs to London during the blitz, when Freddie faced death when he should have been growing to maturity, intersperse the film, but do it no benefit.

While the core of its drama is Hester’s sexual passion, when Rattigan wrote it the Lord Chamberlain still had unfettered power conferred in 1737 to ban plays offering explicit lubricity.

Rattigan had perforce to present Eros by implication. Things are different nowadays, but Davies cleaves to the ethos that Rattigan followed. That’s no bad thing, but a more modern treatment peeking behind the curtains of public morality in Britain in 1950 might have improved the film’s dramatic facade.

Projecting the anguish of a wife unfulfilled, Rachel Weisz is impressive as Hester. Simon Russell Beale as the judge quite compels our interest. Without showing Freddie’s wartime experiences, the film relies on an underlying awareness of them as some partial explanation for his domination of Hester, who grins and bears it for reasons not easy to understand.

I judge Davies’ remake moderately well-crafted, but hard to justify. Its invitation for us to get involved is muted.

At Greater Union