Country: UK
Year: 1957
Duration: 94'


Married for twenty years, Amy and Jim Preston live with their seventeenyearold son in the suburbs. Amy does not realise that her slatternly ways, the discomforts and irritations of a neglected house, are slowly alienating her beloved husband, who finds in Georgie's youth, intelligence and efficiency a contrast to his wife's slovenly vulgarity. When at last he asks Amy for a divorce, she is desperately shocked, but is determined to fight back. She asks Jim to bring Georgie home; and makes an effort to tidy herself and the flat. But a rainstorm ruins her hair and her best dress gets torn. In despair she drinks several neat whiskies, and Jim and Georgie arrive home to find her incapably drunk. She recovers sufficiently to make a bitter attack on Georgie; then, her fury exhausted, she calmly packs Jim's case and sends him off with Georgie. Jim, appalled at the wreckage he has caused, finds that after all he cannot abandon Amy. He says goodbye to Georgie and returns to his home.

"To this extent, the film shares more than a passing resemblance to the work of Douglas Sirk, whose stylistic subversion of melodramatic content has generated a wealth of critical commentary. As Paul Willemen suggests, the Sirkian style operates upon a dialectic of involvement and alienation, of drawing an audience into identification with characters while maintaining a critical distance. One formal strategy much favoured by Sirk, in this respect, is also in evidence in Woman in a Dressing Gown. As Hill suggests, there is a consistent foregrounding of intermediary objects and surfaces which obscure the spectator's vision of the action. Thus, the camera repeatedly shoots through windows, panelling, a china cabinet, even adopting 'impossible' positions to film from behind the cooker or out of a wardrobe. in one sense such a strategy confirms the film's overall moralism. Thus, while Jim and Georgie enjoy their illicit lunch, the camera watches through a grilled window, moving off the action altogether to come to rest on a rainswept brick wall, now filling the whole of the frame. The effect is clearly to disrupt our identification with the situation and establish, in so doing, the ultimate emptiness of the relationship between the two characters. But what complicates the use of this technique is that it is not restricted to scenes between Jim and Georgie alone but extends throughout the movie as a whole, characterising the film's treatment of Amy as well. … Far from being positive, the conclusion would seem to imply enclosure, even internment, with the audience critically distanced from the film's apparently 'happy ending' by the deployment of a device already saturated with negative connotations." (John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, London, BFI Publishing, 1986, pp. 98100)

Biography

film director

John Lee Thompson

Cast

& Credits

Director: John Lee Thompson.
Screenplay: Ted Willis, dal suo lavoro televisivo.
Director of photography: Gilbert Taylor.
Editor: Richard Best.
Art director: Robert Jones.
Music: Louis Levy.
Sound: A. Bradburn, Len Shilton.
Cast: Yvonne Mitchell (Amy), Anthony Quayle (Jim), SyIvia Syms (Georgie), Andrew Ray (Brian), Carole Lesley (Hilda), Michael Ripper (l'uomo del banco dei pegni), Nora Gordon (Mrs. Williams).
Production company: Frank Godwin e J. Lee Thompson per la GodwinWillisLee Thompson.
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