Gregory's Two Girls

Forsyth returns to the site of the small-scale comedy that made his now-battered name with this somewhat ambitious but messy and incompletely developed chronicle of a teacher who talks about responsibility and activism but practices only stagnation, until the discovery that a local computer company is manufacturing torture devices for Third World dictatorships - and the galvanizing influence of a pupil about whom he has erotic fantasies - bring him to belated life. It's easy enough to see what Forsyth had in mind, but the movie isn't at all well integrated - the Big Ideas float like patches of oil on a stagnant loch. The two girls of the title are both merely wet dreams of different kinds (the movie attempts to forge a parallel between his political/social and his personal maturity - the latter of which is achieved by having actress Kennedy hang around in desperation until he's ready for her "ripe" charms); the movie gets its biggest laugh from the well-timed use of the word "beaver"; the happy ending is a total cheat; even the setting isn't particularly well evoked...on the whole it's not likely to significantly revive Forsyth's reputation.