Set in London, it is the story of Charles, a successful but rather stuffy businessman, who meets and marries Belinda, a free-spirited American woman. After a time, he believes she is having an affair because she spends long hours away from home during the day. Charles hires a private detective to follow his wife. Belinda becomes aware that she is being followed, and the detective realises she has found out. However rather than abandoning the case, the detective begins an elaborate game of cat and mouse with the complicity of the wife. The detective finally informs Charles that his wife never had an affair, and merely goes on solitary exploratory walks around the city. The husband realises he has been neglectful and made his wife unhappy. He joins the game of following his wife as an adventure.
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Peter Shaffer expands and updates his one-act play The Public Eye and inevitably courts the objection that the comedy of the original has been ruthlessly broadened and its sentimental bias spelled out over-large on the big screen. But in the process of rendering characters and action more detailed, Shaffer has evolved a curious concoction, somehow poised between the enjoyable absurdity of high romantic comedy and the sentimental tidying up of women's magazine fiction."[2]
Variety wrote: "Peter Shaffer's stage one-acter lasted roughly half as long as this film version and, since nothing has been done to beef up the plot, a good deal of padding was necessary. Curiously, however, it's the padding – expertly staged by Carol Reed and sumptuously photographed by Christopher Challis – that supplies most of the entertainment, Mia Farrow, who looks fine in a new Margaret Sullivan haircut and simple but elegant togs designed by Julie Harris, is every bit as sparkling as the dialog is flat."[3]
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