Woman In A Dressing Gown [DVD] [1957]

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I think the ending is quite a cop out, with no real reason for Jimbo to change his mind over Georgie; having got the worst of it over he then seems to just give in The film won four awards at the 7th Berlin International Film Festival including the first ever FIPRESCI Prize and a special mention for "Best Foreign Film". [14] Mitchell won the Silver Bear for Best Actress. [15] The film also won the 1958 Golden Globe Award for Best English-Language Foreign Film. [16] Stage play [ edit ] I confess that I had never heard of J Lee Thompson's Woman in a Dressing Gown prior to reading Melanie Williams' piece on it in the August edition of Sight & Sound. As someone with both a personal and professional interest in British cinema this is either an unforgivable oversight on my part or symptomatic of the film's current status as something of a forgotten gem. I'd like to think it's the latter, mainly to spare my own blushes, and thankfully we all now have the opportunity to either be introduced to or re-acquainted with this groundbreaking slice of social realist drama. Intensely claustrophobic, with an almost oppressive filmmaking dynamic, the film is a simmering tale of the impact of adultery on the psyche of three desperate characters in post-war London. As the eponymous Woman, hanging from a thread while the dishes pile up around her, Yvonne Mitchell won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 7th Berlin International Film Festival.

call it) is clearly a filmed play, but still works on a cinematic level; in fact it was a TV play first, written by Ted Willis and inspired by the new natural realism emanating from American TV and Melanie Williams for the BFI Screenonline noted "an important reminder that postwar British realism did not begin with the New Wave, and that the 1950s were not devoid of socially engaged cinema, as is sometimes suggested. Indeed, in the field of gender politics, one could argue that this film is considerably more progressive than the New Wave that superseded it, in its focus on the travails of a middle-aged housewife rather than those of a virile young man." [10] multi-tasking. In a poignant scene where Jim struggles to tell her about Georgie, she seems oblivious to his introversion and is more concerned about a depressed neighbour's deteriorating relationship. Jim also Did Syms feel they were making something quite progressive at the time? "I don't think you thought in those terms," she barks. "I just knew I loved this part, and I was like Georgie – a nice girl who kept a wonderfully tidy flat, and I was working like a bloody demon all the hours God gave. I thought you had to be a virtuous housewife. We weren't yet quite emancipated, don't forget. We hadn't got the pill for a start. It made a big difference. Did you realise I had to take my marriage certificate to Marie Stopes to get some sort of birth control?" Like The L-Shaped Room, Woman in a Dressing Gown takes place in a dingy London shaped by austerity rather than Macmillan-era affluence. However, the understated sociological agenda of Ted Willis’s screenplay is concerned less with economics than the desensitising narrowness of Amy’s life. A hapless slattern who has given up on herself as a feminine, sexual being, Amy seldom changes out of her threadbare dressing gown, never cleans or tidies the family’s cramped London council flat, and invariably burns the meals she cooks.

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common at the time - which have those drying stands or whatever it is they're called, where you dry clothes hanging from the ceiling; my Nan had one in her kitchen and I hated it as when it was too one contemporary viewer who said 'It's done for dressing gowns what Psycho did for showers' although I wonder when that comment was made as Psycho was not for another three The film is considered an example of British social realism, and a prototypical version of Kitchen sink realism. Modern criticism has noted that it was more progressive in the field of gender politics than the British New Wave. Higson, Andrew (ed.); Ashby, Justine (ed.); Porter, Vincent (2000). British Cinema: Past and Present: "Outsiders in England: the films of the Associated British Picture Corporation, 1949-1958" . Routledge. p.162. ISBN 9780415220620. {{ cite book}}: |first1= has generic name ( help)

Intentionally, Amy is quite an annoying, often unsympathetic character at the start of the film, hectoring over the music she plays too loudly and pushing into Jim to sew a button on his shirt as he tries to eat his breakfast. The look on Anthony Quayle's face and the developing tension is enough It and the films that followed were, as Richard Armstrong notes, "fed by the 'Angry Young Men' of 1950s theatre, the

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How extraordinary that this ‘lost’ 1957 British melodrama is being reissued in the same week as Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘Red Desert’. It’s nigh-on impossible to imagine more different approaches to the same subject: the suffering of a woman in a loveless, controlling marriage. Where Antonioni’s approach is knowing, artful and sidelong, J Lee Thompson’s film is altogether more direct and, for the time, more challenging. And while the Italian definitely wins points for cinematic technique and psychological rigour, it’d be hard to argue that Thompson’s isn’t the more impactful, emotionally believable work. extremely annoying woman into someone who finds her voice, enough so to make you think that it's perhaps her that should be leaving the useless, weak Jimbo behind; although then you remember mixes the intellectual and the emotional very well...it's proper media criticism" 9/10 - The Medium Is Not Enough

Williams, Melanie, ‘Housewives’ choice’: Woman in a Dressing Gown' in British Cinema of the Fifties. MUP, 2003. My obsession at the moment is watching people pretend to eat in films and TV, with 'The Big Bang Theory' currently the worst offender. Have you noticed that Sheldon, Leonard et al never

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only that she is the disruptive agent as my old mate Vladimir Propp might say. For Jimbo the attraction is obvious; a beautiful woman, 20 years younger (for once the casting is right; Qualyle Finally, on the Monday night, Jimbo tells Amy that he wants a divorce (I supsect that what finally does it for him is that Amy serves up a particularly unappetisiing Thumim, Janet. "The popular cash and culture in the postwar British cinema industry". Screen. Vol.32, no.3. p.259.

She was found dead by her husband Michael Dalling in their New Barnet home on 28 February 1974. [6] At her inquest it was determined that she had died of a drug overdose and that she had "killed herself". [7] Filmography [ edit ] Film and television While director J. Lee Thompson's legacy might lie in the thrillers and action films of his post-British work - from the heights of The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Cape Fear (1962) to the exploitation lows of Death Wish 4 (1987) - his reputation, and ability to diversify, was certainly qualified in the post-war films made in Britain and his contribution to the so called 'social problem' genre. Something of a half-way house between this genre - maturing with the introduction of the X certificate in 1951 - and the arrival of the 'social realism' of the British New Wave is his once neglected but now well regarded Woman in a Dressing Gown(1957).at her replacement and a husband on the defence. It is consistently good and at some moments finely tuned with a great use of physical tics and body language and as Syms explains, in her interview on the disc, women hadn't really been portrayed like this on the screen before. had two things which he always used to comment on in this respect; one was that when people looked in the phone book for a name and number they always alighted on the one they wanted immediately, the This is a film that is difficult to sell to those who haven't seen it - especially as the eternal triangle has been hammered out in countless soap plots, or real lives, since then. But the social context is fascinating and, shortly after the scene-setting at the beginning, the film suddenly exerts a vice-like grip on the emotions, as the wife realises what she has to do to save her marriage, but her approach seems pitiful and doomed to fail.