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Edward Bond's screenplay seems curiously uninformed. Laughter in the Dark is a literalization of the axiom, "Love is blind." Unaccountably, the phrase is omitted from the film. Yet, if the author's scrupulous nuances are vulgarized or lost, some original essence remains. In scores of cruel scenes, Laughter in the Dark is a chart of the banality of evil in which humanity is undone not by a stab in the heart but by a thousand minor slashes to the soul. If for no other reason, the film is worth attention for Williamson's moment of revelation, when a friend informs the sightless and insightless man of the affair-long deceit. Unable to phrase his agonies, Williamson opens his mouth and articulates a wracking shriek that seems to emerge not from his larynx but his marrow. An intellectual howl is a contradiction in terms, but Williamson somehow makes it an embodiment of Nabokov's novel, which is itself an amplification of Prufrock's summing-up of temptation and frailty:
We have lingered in the chambers of
the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed
red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we
drown.
* Williamson is currently starring in a remarkable Hamlet—directed by Tony Richardson—on Broadway. The production will travel to Boston, Berkeley and Los Angeles, beginning June 16.