Scandal

Peter McGinn6/10

Sep 2, 2021

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This film seems to do a fine job recreating the spirit of the 60s, or at least as experienced by the in crowd and the wealthy. John Hurt is great, as usual, and Joanne Whaley os so expressive and magnetic when she smiles or vamps or whatever, I can almost imagine that it was more than beauty that caused Helen of Troy’s face to launch a thousand ships; it was how she looked at men. So I stuck with the film, but I didn’t find it to be compelling. People seemed to mumble at times, and likable characters were pretty thin on the ground. I was left wishing Jean Alexander as Christine’s mother had been given more airtime. And, well, that is about all I have to say about it, I guess.

"Scandal" features the sort of sexually promiscuous depiction of the upper classes that usually results in a keen sense of disassociation which finally leads to disinterest and then downright boredom amongst those patrons in the audience completely unaccustomed with the activities of such banal people, so it is somewhat surprising to discover this isn't actually the case here and as a matter of fact the opposite just happens to be true. This film also does an excellent job of placing all the incidents surrounding what happened between Christine Keeler, the rising star of the Conservative Party John Profumo, and suspected Russian spy Yevgeny Ivanov into some kind of cohesive order and even though the more scandalous aspects have lost a lot of their incendiary political relevance when compared to today's lapsed social standards it is still an incredibly interesting insight into what happened and the people who were caught up in the damaging media maelstrom it generated.