Three Into Two Won't Go (4 Stars)

This is the third of three films I'm watching that belonged to my mother's favourite films. Unlike "Date with a Lonely Girl", it doesn't have a Rotten Tomatoes rating at all. Is it too old (1969) and too obscure to have been noticed?

Steve Howard is a salesman whose office is in London, but he frequently has to travel to Manchester. He picks up a teenage hitchhiker called Ella Patterson while returning home. She seduces him, it's not the other way round. He arranges for her to get a job at a guest house that belongs to Jack, an old army acquaintance. A week later he stops at the guest house again, longing to see her. When he visits a third time, she's gone.

Ella has gone to Steve's house. She makes friends with his wife, claiming that she's left the guest house because Jack was molesting her. This isn't true. She just wants to be with Steve again. She wants to wreck Steve's marriage at all costs.

The film is deliberately austere. Long silences, static compositions and the isolated rural setting emphasise the emotional claustrophobia of the situation. The countryside, often romanticised in British cinema, becomes a place of entrapment rather than escape. The film's pacing is slow, even uncomfortable at times, but this is essential to its effect; it forces the viewer to sit with the characters' unease rather than providing narrative relief.

The film's message is not an attack on non-traditional relationships as such, but a critique of emotional dishonesty and power imbalance. "Three Into Two Won't Go" argues that relationships framed as progressive or liberated can still replicate old forms of control if they're rooted in ego rather than mutual care. Steve believes he's rejecting conventional morality, yet he reproduces its worst elements by positioning himself at the centre of everything.

Crucially, the film refuses to offer a clear moral victory. There is no dramatic punishment, no neat reversal, no comforting lesson about love conquering all. Instead, it leaves the audience with a sense of quiet damage; people leave the arrangement not enlightened but diminished. This ambiguity is precisely what makes the film enduring. It trusts the viewer to recognise that emotional harm does not always announce itself loudly.

In retrospect, "Three Into Two Won't Go" feels like a sceptical response to the sexual revolution rather than a celebration of it. Released at a time when cinema was increasingly embracing permissiveness, it asks whether emotional maturity has kept pace with social experimentation. Its answer is cautious, even pessimistic, but never reactionary.

While the film lacks the stylistic flash that often defines late-1960's cinema, its intellectual seriousness and psychological honesty give it lasting weight. It's a film less interested in romance than in responsibility, and less concerned with desire than with the consequences of indulging it without empathy.

"Three Into Two Won't Go" remains a quietly unsettling study of modern relationships, suggesting that progress is meaningless if it merely repackages selfishness in fashionable language.