MOVIE REVIEW : Oddly, It’s Two Men and a Dog in ‘We Think the World’

Small-scale and splendid, “We Think the World of You” (Los Feliz and AMC Century 14) is a love triangle perhaps only the British could spawn: Frank(ie) and Johnny and Evie.

There’s the scruffy, cheerfully bisexual sailor Johnny (Gary Oldman), who should have Loser tattooed right below Mother on his biceps. Then we have Frank (Alan Bates), his upper-middle class, vaguely literary lover, who yearns for him as deeply as he fathoms Johnny’s shady ways. And finally we have beautiful Evie--the eternal Eve, desired by everyone, possessed by many, whose well-being is at the center of everyone’s attention: Evie, a young German shepherd.

What emerges is brilliant character comedy, entrusted to one of those extraordinary collections of English actors who understand every gradation of irony, wit and, especially, class and exactly how to play it.

Set in London in the 1950s, the film has been immaculately adapted by Hugh Stoddart from the semi-autobiographical novel of Joseph R. Ackerley, who wrote with warmth and candor about his homosexuality at a time when it was not only prosecutable but barely a subject for polite society. The film’s PG rating should give you some idea how genteelly the picture observes the period’s proprieties. Manipulation, not blind lust, is the name of this game, which, of course, makes it an even more perilous and interesting challenge.

Johnny has come to Frank’s attention as the son of Frank’s garrulous former charlady Millie (Liz Smith, best-known in the United States as Maggie Smith’s dense and dotty mother in the piggy comedy “A Private Function”). In one of those reminders of how little the basic fabric of British life has changed since Dickens’ time, Millie’s family is an extended and rather complicated collection.

There is Johnny’s wife Megan (Frances Barber, Rosie in “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid”), sullenly pregnant again. Together they have had the squalling baby Dickie, he of the perpetually runny nose, who appears to have stepped out of a Maurice Sendak illustration. Playing forlornly in their weed-choked East London front yard is a slightly older daughter, Megan’s from some other alliance.

While she works, Megan has dumped baby Dickie on the doting Millie, who also has on her hands an aging second husband, Tom (Max Wall, the unforgettably “rasped” Flintwinch in “Little Dorrit”), a key player in the drama. It’s to Tom and Millie that Johnny entrusts Evie as a young dog, when he goes off to spend a year in prison for a bit of breaking and entering that follows his Navy duty.

And so Frank’s entanglement with the whole blessed family begins, in a mounting climate of frustration, self-righteousness, shabby-gentility, obsession, miscommunication, manipulation, one-upmanship, a jostling for position and outright betrayal. Play that against taut barriers of class and, under Colin Gregg’s direction and in a marvelous re-creation of period and place, you get a particularly savory and hilarious tug-of-war.

Johnny is the prize, of course, but Evie is the pawn. Not a dog fancier in the least, Frank begins to notice during his desperate duty-and-information-gathering calls on Millie, that the irascible Tom never exercises Evie and is even beginning to abuse her. Soon, Frank is almost more involved with Evie than with the absent Johnny, before swirls of jealousy and possessiveness come between him and the dog.

Except that these are the tightly buttoned and repressive ‘50s, some of these maneuverings may remind you of Stephen Frears’ films of inner London life (“Sammy and Rosie” or “My Beautiful Launderette”). But “We Think the World of You” is flatter, slightly more prosaic, infinitely less surreal. It’s closer to John Schlesinger’s elegantly observed short film “An Englishman Abroad,” which sprang from almost exactly the same period and moral climate. Alan Bates was also the star, in a performance as textured yet restrained as this one.

We suffer almost as much as Frank, losing the magnetic, no-good Oldman except for bracketed scenes at the film’s front and back; he’s a dynamo of good-hearted lasciviousness. But director Gregg has given us the supreme contempt of Frances Barber’s Megan and Liz Smith’s sly, unctuous Millie who reaches a pinnacle of importance at last as grandmother, mother and as Max Wall’s supremely obscure object of desire. They make it almost impossible not to think the world of this self-effacing treasure.