New Movies: Sebastian

1984 impinges on 1968—in the aluminum façades of antiseptic buildings, in the whir of computers, and in the human automatons who face their drab jobs with all the relish of zombies. That at least seems to be the view of Sebastian, a film that attempts to analyze the mind-numbing effects of a Pentagonal bureaucracy on a brilliant civil servant.

An Oxford don, Sebastian (Dirk Bogarde) is whacking bad at human relations but so cracking good at puzzle solving that the government employs him to find a cure for the common code used by enemy agents. When hiring new girls for his staff, Sebastian confronts them with questions like "How many words can you make from thorough!" And "What is Naitsabes spelled backward?" A Queeg in mufti, he compulsively fingers a rubber ball as he orders his overworked underlings to "switch your gorgeous minds to overdrive." From time to time, Sebastian mutters antiheroic cliches to himself, like "I'm a septic tank for the world's ugly secrets."

One of Bogarde's pretty code crackers (Susannah York) warms to her maniacal boss and entices him into bed.

The affair becomes the scandal of Whitehall, and Bogarde eventually slinks back to Oxford in disgrace. A year later, though, the old boys need him again and all is forgiven. Bogarde and York rejoin forces—he mechanically holding the solution to the Reds' most recent conundrum in his mind, she tenderly holding their illegitimate son in her arms.

In the title role, Bogarde provides added proof that he is a film actor with an extraordinary range of sensibilities. He is immensely aided by a strong supporting cast, notably Lilli Palmer as a sad-eyed, burned-out leftist, and the omnipresent John Gielgud as Sebastian's chief. But good actors need more than each other in order to make a film work, and in the end Naitsabes spelled backward is only a promising idea mishandled. Dab wohs.