John Soames (Terence Stamp) has been in a coma all of his life after something went wrong with the sleep centre of his brain when he was born. After thirty years, however, the scientific means now exist to wake him - and a medical and media machine is in place to document every minute of his second birth. Soames represents a unique opportunity to start an adult from scratch - to teach him to eat, walk, talk - and obey.
Soames soon tires of being a lab rat, and makes a break for it, clobbering an orderly on his way out. His training has not readied him for real life, however, and he finds himself in a terrifying, lonely world he is utterly unprepared for, i.e. Britain in 1970: a place where it never really gets light, curly sandwiches under plastic cloches, local train services, drunk driving and never ending, soul destroying rain. He doesn't stand a chance, poor little bugger.
A sombre, slightly worthy film, 'The Mind Of Mr. Soames' says pretty much what you might expect but says it well and has a good cast, including Robert Vaughan, Nigel Davenport, Donal Donnelly, Judy Parfitt and Christian Roberts, hugely annoying as usual. Stamp effectively reiterates his wide eyed man child shtick from 'Billy Budd', but here his usual woodenness seems to make sense - Soames is just a baby, after all, not an actor, so Stamp can just relax and set his face to gormless.
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