Quest for Love (1971)

Great Film overall

A different way of telling a story

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

QUEST FOR LOVE is an unusual and oddly intense British science fiction drama, made on a low budget but none the worse for it. It's one of the few films in the genre to explore the idea of alternate realities, sending scientist protagonist Tom Bell to another world after an accident during a demonstration, a world where history has played out differently; JFK is still alive, for instance, and the Vietnam War never happened.As such, the first half an hour of this film is very enjoyable, but after Bell figures out his predicament things change course quite considerably. He meets Joan Collins, who lights up the screen here and turns out to be his neglected wife; a romantic sub-plot of sorts then plays out. However, there's a tragic twist in the tale before things move back to our own world for an extended and thrilling race-against-time climax that had me on the edge of my seat. The cast give very good performances and if the hairstyles and fashions have dated somewhat in the intervening years, then that's no reason to dislike the movie.

Quest for Love is a science fiction romance set in an alternate world. Physicist Colin Trafford (Tom Bell) during an experiment is sent across an alternate Britain in the 1970s which has not gone through World War 2, there is no war in Vietnam, man has not gone to space or even conquered Everest.Here Trafford is a noted but philandering playwright with a troubled marriage to former ballerina Ottilie (Joan Collins.) The new Trafford at first dazed and confused becomes immediately smitten with his wife and aims to woo her again but something is not right with her health. Trafford finds himself going back to his own world and tries to track down the same woman.Tom Bell was known for playing intense even bitter characters, so it is nice to see him play tender and romantic, although we do get angry and perplexed in the early scenes. Bell is matched by Collins who plays the alluring wife married to a fickle man in a nicely understated but charming way.The film loses a bit of impetus at the latter part of the film and also ends abruptly as if the budget ran out.

Firstly, I applaud jekyll-booty1's review. Secondly this film, when watched as I did, mesmerised, from the first rather expositional minutes of set-up, is beautifully engaging to behold. The premise is so easy to go with, that the actual acting performances shine far beyond the mere scripting of character and circumstance would seem to allow. We want the alternative universe's possibility to live beyond the, somewhat jaded, actuality that provokes the sewer as the impossible, alternative, romance unfolds. Tom Bell does his profession justice. Joan Collins gets a bit of careful soft-focus allure but still runs well with the rather restrictive role the script provides her with (air hostess ?). A cracking TV film for an otherwise dreary mid-week slot, but so above the other too pedestrian fodder offered. Remarkable both for it's evergreen poignancy and it's disdainful yet life-affirming regard for one's world-weary, all-too-knowing, regrets and schadenfreude.

To my considerable annoyance, every time this movie has been shown on TV I haven't had my VCR ready to record. I've probably seen it about three or four times, on the proverbial rainy afternoons when little-regarded films are broadcast. It's been described by other IMDb reviewers as a sci-fi love story, and it certainly is that. But it's also a rare foray for a mainstream movie into counterfactual history. (In this respect it resembles novels such as Kingsley Amis's "The Alteration", Keith Roberts' "Pavane" and Robert Harris's "Fatherland" more than it resembles other movies.) Colin Bell, a physicist, finds himself in a parallel version of our world after an experiment that goes wrong. The Second World War has not happened, and in all kinds of subtle and intriguing ways society is less advanced. The course of his own life has been drastically different as well: he is a playwright and novelist, not a physicist; he attended Oxford (arts and humanities-based) not Cambridge (science-based); his best friend (played by Denholm Elliot) has not lost his arm in WW2; most significantly, while single in OUR world, he discovers that he is, albeit unfaithfully, married in this one.I'll concede that the conclusion of the movie IS rushed, but the rest of it is so superbly executed that I'm prepared to overlook this. Of course not all of the implications of this bizarre scenario are investigated; how could they be in a 90-minute movie? I'd agree with the other IMDb reviewer, who remarked that OUR world is limned far less vividly than its doppelganger. But this is surely as it should be; after all, we KNOW our world.The unanswered question that has nagged me every time I have seen the movie is: Where is the other Colin Trafford? Surely the arrogant, womanising drunk isn't on the loose in our world, wreaking havoc in the the domain of research physics? (I think we're meant to assume that he's temporarily inhabiting his double's comatose body in hospital.) What is highly ingenious, and could pass unnoticed, such is the subtlety of its handling, is the way in which, although we never actually see him, we infer from people's reactions exactly what sort of person the other Colin Trafford was. (I'm reminded of the scene in the original "Nutty Professor" in which Buddy Love is introduced; we see him, at first, entirely in terms of other people's reactions.)We still seem to be too near to the 60s and 70s (psychologically if not chronologically) for people to overlook the now-quaint fashions. Come on, though! Even the 70s are thirty years ago now. We're not surprised to see people in Edwardian times, or the 1930s, dressed in radically different clothes. Why should it strike as odd (and funny) that people more than a generation ago inhabited a universe more different from ours than the one that physicist Colin Trafford finds himself in? Every time I read someone dismiss a movie because the fashions are dated I want to scream! Such a lack of historical perspective means that there's a very real danger that anyone much under 40 or so will not be able to observe the subtle, but very real, contrast between the "real" world in "Quest For Love", and its slightly more old-fashioned twin, and will thus miss out on an important layer of the movie's meaning.