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f i l m Secret Friends Examined piece by piece, "Secret Friends" has a lot of solid stuff to it, especially the acting: Bates is manic and convincing; Bellman portrays the prim and whorish Helen with equal confidence. And Potter knows how to captivate an audience visually. ...John Anderson, Los Angeles Times, Friday January 23, 1998   Murderous Trip Into a Mad Nightmare Reviewed in the Daily Mail 25 September 1992 EASY TO SUSPECT this film of being a brilliant pastiche of Dennis Potter's work -- all elements present, from grim childhood, sexual fear and loathing, shuffled timescale, to big-band music, a maddening girl and an arbuably mad man. No pastiche, however, but Potter's debut as director of the screen version of his own novel, "Ticket To Ride," in which Alan Bates is John, who may or may not have murdered his temptress wife Helen (Gina Bellman of TV's "Blackeyes") and she may or may not have murdered a couple of neighbours who dropped in for the purpose. John has schooled his wife to play a call-girl with him as the only client, we're on firm ground there. The rest, fascinating in its way, especally for those fascinated by what fascinates Potter, is enigmatic as Alice in Wonderland or a fever dream. Possibly it is taking place in poor John's head, a mental hall of distorting mirrors. Competently directed, "Secret Friends" is ornately strange and occasionally blackly funny. Ian McNiece and Davyd Harries are great value as nightmare counterparts of those buffers played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford in "The Lady Vanishes," watching John's breakdown in an Inter-City dining car. Potter's strength is also an Achilles heel. He cares about the people he creates, even when they look suspiciously like symbols, so it is small surprise that he takes them seriously. "Friends" is so tortuous and repetitive that it is hard to share such commitment, from start to finish. The message, or one of them, might be that fantasy is dangerous and shared fantasies, doubly so. Such a lot of fus over fortune-cookie wisdom. Bruce Williamson, Playboy April 1992 IN HIS FIRST outing as a feature-film director, English writer Dennis Potter brings us Secret Friends (Briarpatch). His author's hat tipped at a cockeyed angle, as usual, Potter gets nowhere near the lofty level of his TV writing for "The Singing Detective" and "Pennies from Heaven" (his film adaptation of the latter won him an Oscar nomination in 1981). Friends, based on a Potter novel called "Ticket to Ride," stars Alan Bates as a man whose mind drifts into absurd fantasies during a train trip. He confronts his own other self, a kind of doppelganger, while dreaming up intimate encounters with his wife, a flirtatious neighbor and the usual suspects in a so-called "comical thriller." There are laughs, particularly during the hero's frustration in the dining car, where everyone cncludes that his troubles are caused by a dubious order of fish. Too much of the time, though, Potter's plot is so mired in complexity that an audience is more apt to become bored than intrigued. Full Text © Playboy Enterprises Inc. 1992

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