Movie review - "The Wicked Lady" (1946) ****

(originally published for the Blacklist)

Here’s a pitch for an erotic thriller…

Meet Barbara. Twenties. Sexually voracious. Stunning. Emotionally messed up by her mother’s death. Visits her boring best friend from high school who’s in love with an older rich guy. Barbara seduces the old guy, marries him, moves into a mansion.

Barbara gets bored. She gets the hots for a hunky young dude she meets at her own wedding and tries to seduce him. She stops sleeping with her old husband and starts robbing people for kicks and a bit of spare cash. She meets another thief, and they start a torrid affair. A servant of the old guy busts her, but she kills him with poison. She catches her thief lover in bed with another woman, so shoots him dead. She falls in love with the hunky younger dude, and he loves her — but he shoots her while she’s committing a robbery, not realizing it’s the woman he loves. She dies from her wounds. The old guy winds up back with the boring best friend.

Sex, murder, betrayal, robbery, couple swapping, irony…. You can see it, can’t you? In 1993 you’d have Shannon Tweed or Tanya Roberts as Barbara, and Andrew Stevens as one of the male leads.

But it wasn’t made in the 1990s — it was actually shot in 1945 and it was called THE WICKED LADY.

And it was one of the most popular British movies of all time.

THE WICKED LADY was one of a series of films known today as “Gainsborough melodramas.” They made in the 1940s by Gainsborough Pictures, usually set in the past, and turned actors like Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, Stewart Granger, and Phyllis Calvert into stars. The plots were full of sex, greed, longing, murder and death. In THE MAN IN GREY (1943) Lockwood sleeps with Mason, the abusive husband of her best friend Calvert, who is actually in love with Granger; Lockwood arranges for Calvert to die, but is killed herself by Mason. In MADONNA OF THE SEVEN MOONS (1944) Calvert is married with a daughter when she discovers she has a split personality that makes her run off to Florence and become the mistress to thief Stewart Granger. In CARAVAN (1946) Stewart Granger loves Anne Crawford but loses his memory and marries gypsy girl Jean Kent.

The films were critically despised and enormously popular (in Britain at any rate — American audiences never much went for them.) Being set in the past allowed not just cool costumes and sets, but enabled a lot of (relatively) daring sexual and political content to get past the censor. This had resonance during the social upheaval of World War II, particularly for female audiences experiencing unprecedented financial and sexual independence at the time.

The stories normally focused around a “good” woman and a “bad” woman, who would drive the action, and gave audiences a choice of who to identify with/fantasize over. The bad woman usually slept around a lot, murdered people and was killed at the end, but she was also (in the better of these films, at least) depicted with some empathy — it was clear she was “that way” for a reason, whether a restrictive society, a cruel husband, love of a dud guy, etc A sympathetic character could still genuinely love the bad girl, as in THE WICKED LADY. And the “good” girl was always shown to have strong sexual drives — she was just better able to control them — and her passivity was normally shown to have bad consequences, eg. sitting back and watching another woman steal your husband. They did a similar good-bad split with their male leads — the good man was dashing but decent and poor, the bad man was cruel and violent but also rich and sexy.

By the late 40s the genre died out as the films became less popular. Its death was helped along by executives and stars embarrassed by the films’ complete lack of critical acclaim, but it has to be admitted that later Gainsborough melodramas movies don’t work as well as the first ones. They were either given the serious, “respectful” treatment and became a lot less fun (e.g. SARABAND FOR DEAD LOVERS, 1948), or began to focus too much on the male characters (e.g. HUNGRY HILL, 1947, BAD LORD BYRON, 1949) or they were miscast (anything with Dennis Price in a lead), or they were simply ineptly done… For instance JASSY (1947) and THE ROOT OF EVIL (1947), instead of having two female leads, one good and one bad, both feature the one female lead who is a mixture of good and bad, which may be more true to life, but tends to be dramatically unsatisfying and rob the films of narrative drive and conflict.

The films were harder to make well than people realized at the time, or indeed later — for instance, take a look at the Faye Dunaway-Michael Winner remake of THE WICKED LADY (1983.) It adds nudity and violence, including a duel with horsewhips between Dunaway and a topless Mirina Sirtis, but lacks the same energy and focus.

The 1945 WICKED LADY was not robbed when overlooked at Oscar time. It is often silly — practically every scene has a moment which feels like “this is the subtext” is being subtitled on screen. The actors ham it up — Margaret Lockwood’s nostrils literally flare in some scenes. It is not politically correct. There is an unpleasant rape scene.

But it has a plot full of action and incident; it has clearly defined characters who behave logically and contrast in clear ways; it is centered around a fascinating female protagonist who is not likeable but always compelling and whose desires (for sex, love, money, safety) drive the bulk of the story; there are strong male characters (well, two of them). And, for 1945 British cinema, it is extremely erotic — people have sex in fields, cheat on spouses, fall in lust at first sight — and is thrilling. It has integrity. And what your erotic thriller needs as much as eroticism and thrills, is integrity.