A difficult film with some nasty moments but then is hardly surprising with a title like The Brute. Gerry O'Hara worked in the business most of his life and between the 50s and 60s worked up to assistant director with such as, Otto Preminger, Carol Reed, Tony Richardson and Laurence Oliver. In1963 he was director for the first That Kind of Girl (1963) and was a sexual titillation while moralising about the dangers of STDs and later The Pleasure Girls (1965) written by O'Hara and directed with a swinging 60s scene. He made more films and then came up with his new one of The Brute and written and directed but never had much of an audience. It is a strange and is surely exploitation with the film at the opening with the most terrible of her husband burst into the middle of the night and drunk beats her savagely. There is another scene later on and she tries help. The film then becomes more of how it is the bad about men.

Back when cable TV was new (early 1980s) some of the movie channels were airing obscure British films like this to fill time slots. Most of the them (like this one) were pretty good. It deals with Diana Shepherd (Sarah Douglas) being routinely beaten by her sadistic husband Teddy (Julian Glover). She realizes she can't deal with it anymore and leaves...but Teddy won't let her have their child Timmy.

The beatings themselves are (pretty obviously) faked but this does deal with an touchy subject matter with taste and intelligence. This is much better than the TV movies over here dealing with the same subject back then. The acting is good across the board and it does have a happy and believable ending. No great shakes but it's stayed with me for almost 30 years! Recommended.

The British film industry in the seventies was in a very strange place, which ironically paved the way for a number of films you just can't imagine being made in any other decade, or under any other circumstances. With the wealthy American backers out of the picture and the home video boom lurking just around the corner, the seventies remains perhaps British cinema's most insane and strangely compulsive decade, where bona-fide cult classics such as the Wicker Man and Get Carter rub alongside dirt-cheap sex flicks like 1972's the Love Box and Derren Nesbitt's ill-fated the Amorous Milkman, and big budget Bond films and Lew Grade-sponsored splashy blockbusters flickered onto fleapit screens only recently vacated by the 'moral obscenities' of the bad boys of British horror, Pete Walker and Norman J. Warren.

The Brute, with its uneasy combination of gloss and glamour, sordid violence and kitchen-sink realism, dingy location filming and titles apparently rendered in transfer lettering, is seventies Britain to its toenails, although the introduction from a psychiatrist seems to hark back to the 'white coat' sex films of the previous decade, where narration from a practising doctor was a crafty way of getting nudity and naughty bits past the ever-vigilant censor. Other concessions to contemporary trends are apparent in a bit of pro- feminist black power arse-kicking doled out to a serial abuser, the overall appearance of Bruce 'Withnail and I' Robinson's sympathetic hippy photographer, and the inevitable spacious house apparently in the middle of nowhere, which (as anyone who's seen A Clockwork Orange or Straw Dogs will readily testify) was seventies cinema shorthand both for comfortable living, and the nagging feeling that something horrible was about to happen.

The biggest problem with the film is that it's not really sure what it wants to be, and as a result, the mood of the piece is all over the place, swinging wildly from shadowy, Gothic-horror theatricals to quasi-documentary bleakness and back again, buoyed by the largely fine performances. Some sensible points are made, there's food for thought to spare and we are never once asked (or allowed) to be sympathetic toward the abusers, but the plot feels strangely tacked on and the denouement lamentably botched.

The Brute opened briefly in early 1977 to a storm of protests and accusations of bad taste and quickly vanished, though it did receive a video release in the early eighties on the Brent Walker label and a region one DVD release seems to be doing the rounds in collector's circles. It's a difficult film to enjoy - it's frequently a difficult film to watch - but fans of obscure British cinema with a taste for the offbeat should definitely track it down and remind themselves just how eclectic (if decidedly strapped for cash) the domestic film industry really was in that most conflicted of decades.