The Strange Affair

The Strange Affair is an aptly named film from 1968, although the double meaning irony hits home when you find the main protagonist’s name is Strange.

When we first meet Strange it becomes clear he is a disgraced policeman, and the film quickly falls into flashback, to his first day on the force and catalogues how this idealistic young copper ended up going down for a stretch.
But there’s more stories that weave themselves around the hapless Strange. One of his colleagues is embittered Detective Sergeant Pierce, hell-bent on bringing down the Quince family, a family no-good drug-dealers and all-round bad eggs, headed up by ex policeman Jack Watson.
On his off-duty Strange gets involved with the free-spirited and young Fred (Susan George) who introduces him to her uninhibited life and bizarre Aunt and Uncle. It transpires that the Aunt and Uncle like to film their niece in the throes of passion and then sell the film on the black market. Fred is seemingly unaware of this side to her family. This has a disastrous effect when DS Pierce finds photos of Strange and Fred in flagrante and uses this to bully and blackmail Strange into planting drugs on Quince in a desperate attempt to get him locked up.

Written down it seems like a straightforward tale but the director manages to film it as a series of bizarre events that crash into a man’s life leaving him bewildered as to what is actually happening to him. Of course, reflecting on it, it is basically the bad choices and decisions that Strange made that lead to his downfall, not helped by the on-the-edge-of-sanity DS Pierce’s bullying ways.
The copy I watched wasn’t the most wonderful copy (this is a film that has basically disappeared and to my knowledge has never been released on Video and definitely not on DVD) but it still looked good enough to capture the gritty streets of 1960’s London in realistic detail – no sunny, swinging sixties kitsch was involved in the making of this film. The best way I can describe this drama is ‘off-kilter’ , in a good way and with a dose of 60’s realism that you don’t see all that often.