The Tamarind Seed

Blake Edwards sometimes has an amazing way with plastic people and plastic situations, but he can't do much with the weighty, wordy romance that blooms as Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif spar leadenly, and at length, and fend off the final clinch until an appropriate Sound of Music-style landscape descends around their ears. Nor can he do much with the spy story that develops out of this holiday affair in Barbados, because she happens to be a Home Office secretary, and he a KGB official. Much more satisfying is the round of Embassy parties captured in all their ritualistic bitchness of acrid marriages and double-faced relationships. As usual, too, Edwards invests the film with a great spatial feeling, but the good things remain strictly marginal.