Slaughter meets other clients, including rich Middle Easterners who set her up in an expensive flat in Mayfair. She continues to work at the think tank, where she doesn't much mind that certain people know about her moonlighting. Bulbeck gets involved in tricky negotiations involving a Middle East peace settlement, and of course the Special Branch monitors all of his activities. It checks out Slaughter and eavesdrops on his private moments, and that is as it should be.
What makes "Half Moon Street" so intriguing up to this point is the literal and almost offhand honesty that grows between the Weaver and Caine characters. Their feelings are clear, their motives are clear, and with their eyes wide open they're falling in love.
This whole aspect of the movie is essentially the contribution of the director, Bob Swaim, and his co-writer, Edward Behr. In Paul Theroux's original novel, Doctor Slaughter, Bulbeck was older and less amusing, and Slaughter was very alone in the world she had made for herself. The love that grows between the bright young woman and the gentle middle-aged man provides a subject that wasn't there in the Theroux version, and so it's sort of a shock when the plot reintroduces itself.
The plot has to do with Middle Eastern intrigues, spy rings, terrorists and plans to sabotage Bulbeck's peace initiative. And it leads to the movie's closing sequences, in which we lose the particular charms of the growing romance and find ourselves back in those familiar movie cliches where everything is settled with violence. God, it's boring to have to wait through an obligatory series of scenes until all of the right people have been killed and the movie can be over.
The last scene in "Half Moon Street" is particularly unconvincing, because for a long time this movie seemed so unorthodox that I expected a tough and realistic ending in which at least one of the wrong people would get killed. No such luck. And so I was right: The movie is interesting primarily because of the interaction between Weaver and Caine. Swaim deserves credit for the intelligence and wit of the first 80 or 90 minutes, but must also take the blame for the ending, which is a complete surrender to generic conventions.
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