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The histrionics are brilliant. Marian Spencer—lurching from one unmade bed to another, fingering her stringy hair, leading from weakness with a cunning all the more effective because she is apparently unconscious of it—is the blowzy, middle-aged Lorelei to dreadful perfection. And Harold Warrender makes just the sort of husband such women make sure to get: a man who needs a mother so badly he will take a witch into the bargain.
Russell Enoch catches exactly that sense of undetermined sex that hovers about mama's boys; Elsy Albiin is pretty and weak, as Cocteau intended the girl to be; and Ruth Dunning, as the maiden aunt.-wears precisely the cold, smug, secretly desperate look of the 45-year-old spinster who is still telling herself that she gave up the man who mattered "for his own good."
If the actors carry the play, however, it is only as stretcher-bearers to a queer, sick thing. The objection is not that the situation is ingrown and morbid; twisted lives have often served the purposes of art very well, e.g., in Cocteau's last film. The Strange Ones. But in Intimate Relations, the matter and the manner have almost no relation. To a subject whose essence is disorder, Cocteau has brought a tidy style that is often inadequate—but then it would take a creative Hercules to clean up this emotional stable.