A very sweet (a little too, no doubt, for some tastes) adaptation of the Russell Hoban novel, directed by John Irvin, from a script by Harold Pinter. A relationship between a man and a woman that's founded on nothing but their mutual desire to liberate three sea turtles after thirty years' residence in the London Zoo, and that doesn't stand in the way of each of them developing other (and sexual) relationships with other members of opposite sexes, is quite refreshing in contemporary films, to say the least. Or to say the most, either. The turtle-napping itself is perhaps too neat and snag-free, but there is refreshment to be taken, too, in the absence of any artificially cranked-up suspense. In any event the patness of the caper isn't a problem for the rest, and by far the most, of the film. Ben Kingsley, looking and acting like Ben Gazzara's unglamorous brother, is very touching as the prissy book-shop clerk who masterminds the plan, when he is not preoccupied with, for example, scrubbing up the stove or the tub after their use by the inconsiderate foreigner in the same rooming house. And Glenda Jackson is surely more touching than usual, which is to say more tentative and less arm-twisting, as the inactive children's-book author, and recent obsessed owner of a pet water beetle, who comes in on the plan. But a couple of smaller performances -- pound for pound, as they say -- yield nothing in touchingness to the larger ones: Harriet Walter as Kingsley's co-worker who ventures into some modest sexual aggression in an effort to ward off spinsterhood, and Eleanor Bron -- especially her -- as another of Kingsley's rooming-house mates, rather more despairingly advanced into spinsterhood. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd