Dickie Attenborough - the lachrymose director of the justly well-regarded Shadowlands and Gandhi - is what's known as a national treasure.

So was the Queen Mother. But you wouldn't necessarily want her directing a turgid tearjerker about a widow unable to get over the death of her one true love.

Shirley MacLaine is Ethel, the spirit-supping misery-guts we first meet when she can't even be bothered stepping into the church for her hubbie's funeral.

It turns out that he was the boyhood pal of her first love, an American flyboy, who met a sticky end when his B-17 bomber crashed into the hills above Belfast during World War II.

Before going off to fight, the dashing Teddy (Stephen Amell) got spliced with the young Ethel (Barton) but made his buddy Chuck (David Alpay) promise to look after her if anything should happen.

It did...so Ethel and Chuck found themselves in a loveless marriage while a third chum Jack (Plummer) moped around in the background, secretly hiding his love for Ethel.

Got it? Well, fast-forward thirty years and Pete Postlethwaite's Oirish scavenger is rooting around the wreckage of the doomed bomber.

A ring is unearthed - under the watchful eye of the local IRA (who feature in a ropey sub-plot best ignored) - and Ethel is shaken out of her lethargy and forced to confront the past.

For reasons of charity, Sir Dickie should be handed a bit of slack for his services to the British film industry. Unfortunately, this is not one of them.

The director seems trapped in a bygone universe where every Irish scene needs a tin whistle soundtrack and the ill-advised gags appear to have been written by Frank Carson.

The narrative is tortuous melange of flashback as the plot flits to and fro between small-town Michegan and the stricken Belfast of the early 1970s.

A low-point is reached when Christopher Plummer gets tipsy in the diner and gives one of the most unconvincing portrayals of a drunk in recent memory.

You'd like to think he was so sozzled he might forget ever getting involved in this tepid nonsense.

Tim Evans