Cinema: How to Neck in a Wheelchair

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Long Ago, Tomorrow is a British film about two paralytics who find their handicaps no barrier to love. There are perhaps a dozen other ways to describe the plot, none of which would make it sound any less sentimental. Moreover, Director-Scenarist Bryan Forbes (Seance on a Wet Afternoon) seems less dedicated to insights than to untoward assaults on the tear ducts.

A young footballer and aspiring writer (Malcolm McDowell) is abruptly struck down with an unnamed disease that cripples his legs and sours his disposition. Convalescing in a London hospital, he scoots around in his wheelchair, snorting at the chaplain, scorning doctors' advice and generally making a nuisance of himself. Soon he meets a pretty fellow patient with a similar affliction (Nanette Newman). Zapped by love, McDowell begins to sell his poems and stories and even manages to solve the thorny technical problem of how to neck in two wheelchairs. Marriage is inevitable. But not, in this kind of movie, a happy ending.

Malcolm McDowell's excellent acting lends the proceedings a strong sense of reality that they hardly deserve. At the fadeout, mourning his lost love, McDowell is brought around to accepting life again by a couple of fellow patients who engage him in a game of Ping Pong. The metaphor is trite, mawkish, ultimately ludicrous—perfectly consonant in other words with the rest of the movie.