Director Michael Apted's first feature film adapted from a short novel by H.E. Bates and like Bates' novels this captures the eerie splendidness of the English countryside in this warped romance. Glenda Jackson plays Alice who faithfully tenders her family farm during the Second World War with her husband a prisoner of war. One day she finds a young soldier, Barton (Brian Deacon), wandering across her fields and invites him to share a meal. Soon they become lovers and Barton, a conscript who hates the army, decides to go AWOL and stay with Alice who has the idea to pass him off as her sister, Jill. But 'Jill' finds she is appealing to a bullish army sergeant (Oliver Reed) a situation that increases the risk of discovery for Barton and Alice. Reed is inspired casting here, frightening yet somehow vulnerable too and Jackson is excellent as the lonely woman who briefly finds comfort in the arms of a younger man. An interesting British drama that has probably been forgotten nowadays but worth checking out to see Reed and Jackson together on screen in another memorable partnership following Women In Love (1969).