Beautiful mother of five Jo leaves the banality of her marriage to second husband Giles to wed her passionate screenwriter lover, Jake Armitage. As her suspicion of Jake's philandering grows, Jo's sanity spirals.

Screenwriter Jake Armitage (Peter Finch) and his wife Jo (Anne Bancroft) live in London with six of Jo's eight children; the two eldest boys are at boarding school The children are spread over Jo's three marriages; only the youngest is Jake's biological child, but he treats them all as his own. Jo left her second husband Giles (Richard Johnson) after meeting Giles' friend Jake; the two were immediately attracted to each other. Their upper-middle-class life is very different from Giles and Jo's; who lived in a barn in the English countryside. But Jo is ruminating about her strained marriage to Jake, with issues on both sides. Jo suspects Jake of chronic infidelity, only confronting him with her suspicions whenever evidence presents itself. Jo's psychiatrist believes that she uses childbirth as a rationale for sex, which he believes she finds vulgar. The combination of these issues has placed Jo in a fragile metal state. Both state that they love each other, but neither seems to like the other much. As they prepare to move back to the English countryside, into a new house within sight of Jo's old barn, both Jo and Jake come to their own unspoken individual conclusions of whether their marriage can withstand these strains.—Huggo

The study of a marriage. Jo has five children and husband number two when she meets writer Jake Armitage. She leaves her husband to marry Jake, and his career takes off. A few years and at least one child later, Jo is deeply depressed, breaking down in the middle of Harrods. After psychiatric care and the prospect of a new house in the country, she gets better; then she is pregnant again, and this time Jake objects. Jo consents to an abortion and sterilization in the belief it will make her marriage happy again, but afterwards she learns ugly truths about Jake. She confronts him. "Why did you marry me?" and "What should we do?" become nearly unanswerable questions.—<[email protected]>