IS THEIR ART, the English have always had a knack for electroplating the basest metal with silvery gentility and presenting it like the finest tea service. This wonderful alloy of nastiness and reserve is the stuff of such typical British products as Alec Guinness classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, Agatha Christie's drawing room whodunits. Monty Python, and Evelyn Waugh, Brimstone and Treadestems from this tradition of black comedy, but departs from it by crossing over the boundary between laughter and darkness once too often. The result, while disturbing and thought-provoking, is ultimately unsatisfactory.

The film's conceit is promising at the outset. The highly effective opening scenes show a dove like flock of young choristers running out from under the dripping Gothic gargoyles of a London church. Among them we find the darkly clad figure of a sullen young man in his early 20s (Sting). This stranger begins deliberately accosting passerby on the rainy street with an "accidental" jostle and a subsequent "Why, you're the last person I expected to see!" Someone finally falls for this deception--Thomas E. Bates(Denholm Eihott) a harried middle-aged writer of mass-produced inspirational verse. His daughter Patricia(Suzanna Hamilton)has been severely brain damaged by a hit-and-run accident four years previously, and is now taken care of by her mother(Joan Plowright). Pretending to be an old friend of Patricia's named Martic Taylor, the young man gradually insinuates himself into the Bates weary household through an artful combination of flattery and false innocuousness.

At this point, Brimstone and Treacle takes on two leavels of significance. On the surface, it is simply ferocious black comedy. Patricia may be brain damaged but as her father puts it, her body is that of an attractive young woman." a fact certainly not lost on Martin. To be in a position to take advantage of Patricia's obvious helplessness. Martin must first deploy his arsenal of obsequious-schoolboy charm on Mrs Bates("can I call you... mumsey?"). "I love house work its's such a-a peaceful art" he exclaims rapturously, eyes rolling upwards.

THOMAS is highly suspicious of this and mutters that the intruder could be the devil himself, for all we knew. This point us toward the film's deeper, religious level. Martin is indeed more than a Tartuffe who dispenses hypocritical banalities left and right. Underneath the treacly outside is a hard brimstone core, something profoundly evil When he is finally alone in the house with Patricia, he possesses her in a horribly cold-blooded manner, only to engage in a long heated prayer session with Mrs. Bates an hour later.

The irony is that Martin is merely utteruing the same treacly religious platitudes that Thomas writes for a living, in hymn and verse form. Thomas believes in them as little as Martin. "There is no loving God, just a cruel beast. There is no hope, no such thing as miracles." he says gloomly, laying bare his fundamentally pessimistic atheism. His wife, on the other hand, firmly believes in miracles, and sees Martin as a hope for her daughter's recovery.

The main problem with Brimstone and Treacle is that it has no real moral center. Although the film focuses consistently on Martin, he doesn't hold out attention the way Alex does in A Clockwork Orange. His dialogue lacks even Alex's vestigal, atrophies humanity and perverse humor. We are never given any background or reasons for his actions, he remains a cipher-too much of an antiChrist and not enough of an anti-her. None of the Bates family provides a counterbalance to Martin Thomas is an all-too human aggregate of frailties; guilty and hypocritical mauvaise fol combined with an almost gloom which seems out of place. His wife, while sympathetic and a true believer, is almost as weak as he, and far less intelligent Patricia is too much of a vegetable to elicit more than viscereal pity. Thus watching these characters interact is disturbing, but the film remains fundamentally hollow on the emotional level.

Director Richard Loneraine (The Missionary) exacerbate this hollowness by taking a heavy-handed approach to the film. After a deft beginning full of irony, the humor inherent in some of the grotesque dialogue and situations fades away, leaving the unsavory side of the film to dominate.

The score, mostly original music performed by his band. The Police, with additional numbers by Squeeze and the Go Go's, fails to match the mood and action of the film, adding to the disjointed impression. Sting's contribution as an actor, however, is excellent. He carries the Malcolm McDowell villainous schoolboy role a step or two higher in intensity: in fact, the two even resemble each other somewhat physically, especially in the cold glare of the eyes. Denholm Elliott characterized every feature of Thomas to perfection, and Joan Plowright manages to make her character warm and sympathetic under the circumstances.

But the fine acting cannot hide the fact that Brimstone and Teacle lacks the cardinal British virtue of propriety: it becomes incongruous and off-putting rather than truly thought-provoking. In the end, it's like watching a Sid Vicious sneer slowly curling the stiff upper lip under the black bowler hat of English tradition.