Later, he emerged from the closet to live with unusual openness as a gay man amid the Bright Young Things of 1920s London, before retreating into heterosexual marriage and fatherhood, and converting late in life to Catholicism.

The dialogue is quietly scathing, and the production values are sumptuous. But Davies seems most interested in Sassoon as a symbol of hemmed-in Englishness whose personal misery the director confronts head on.