Die verruchte Lady

Boorish remake of the Margaret Lockwood stormer, with an admittedly surging Faye Dunaway (who gave up a major role in a respectable film of 'King Lear' to appear!) doing the honours.

It's a Michael Winner film: choppy editing and rushed plot existing purely to veer from one lewd outrage to the next let that drop right quick. Another dead giveaway is the preposterous wealth of acting big-hitters - John Gielgud, Prunella Scales, Derek Francis, Alan Bates, John Savident, Denholm Elliott . . the list goes on - which seem bafflingly common in Winner bombs.

Glynis Barber is set to marry rich lord, Elliott. Her pampered sister, Dunaway, arrives for the splicing but within minutes she and Elliott are frolicking in the fronds and she's snagged him for herself. The wedding is coarse, mansion life a bore, and it's not long before the scowling newlywed has taken to roadside wrongdoing, shacking up with vulgarian highwayman Bates - brash, sweaty, no James Mason - along the way.

What Gielgud thinks of it all you can see in his face : a weary grimace every time he delivers a tawdry line. Scales is another whose deportment painfully demonstrates that she too has realised far too late in the day that she's signed up to a complete bummer.

A particular low, amongst many, is Glynis Barber's body-double and an astonishingly bad Oliver Tobias - slapstick wig, someone else's voice - doing a wretched fireside love scene. Listen to Tony Banks (!) gaudy orchestral swell as they manoeuvre into several unlikely and dull sex positions.

Controversy - a Winner requisite - was raised when British censors objected to Dunaway horsewhipping topless Marina Sirtis - another Winner requisite - at a public hanging and started snipping. A furious Winner engaged a posse of the great and the good to defend his film, only for them to later realise the censors were quite right. As the late, great Derek Malcolm once said of another Winner duffer: "I wouldn't have cut it, I'd've burnt it !"

Sirtis - ripe and sultry, for sure - a shoe-in for Mia Khalifa, does deliver the film's one good line, and Winner should have gone the full comedy route instead of the crass ribaldry, gurning and quasi-Hammer Horror music motifs he did. Fatally, the film doesn't know what it is, and ends up merely a clamorous mess dressed up to the nines in swanky costumes and pulchritudinous photography.

Points for the 'Directed by Michael Winner' legend set over a pair of advancing bare jigglies, which was either Winner puckishly anticipating the predictable critical hostility his film met on release, or actively participating in it.

This movie is listed as an action/comedy, but the only thing remotely amusing is in Marina Sirtis's nude scene. While running away, it is quite evident that she has a tan line that indicates a French cut bikini bottom, something I would think was quite rare in the 17th century.

I highly recommend that instead of this video, one either rents the original or a copy of Finney's excellent "Tom Jones".

This film is another example of why perspicacious cinema-goers have always needed to be very wary when major studios decide to remake a well known classic. Perhaps IMDb should create a list of such remakes and give viewers the chance to vote on them as better or worse than the original, possibly adding comments when appropriate. Hopefully these comments might make the studios concerned much more wary about following this rather dubious practice. This 1983 film is a remake in colour of the classic black and white film of the same name starring Margaret Lockwood, which was released in 1945, and it can still be readily found on videotape. Unfortunately the original 1945 film is not and is becoming very hard to find outside the U.K. where Margaret Lockwood's name still commands enormous respect in the entertainment world.

Although this remake was able to obtain an R rating in the U.S.A. (by report only with considerable difficulty) it is in my opinion straight pornography- not because it realistically portrays the cruelty and violence of an eighteenth century execution at Tyburn, shows two women fighting with horsewhips, and includes a little more nudity than was generally regarded as acceptable at the time of its release, but because all these scenes were only peripherally necessary to the story line and were clearly only featured and prolonged in the way that they were for the purpose of audience titillation. If you want to be titillated in this way then by all means watch this remake which will probably provide exactly what you expect; but if you want to view a work of art which is in fact infinitely more sexy than this remake, join the demand for a DVD of the 1945 film (which is already available in PAL format for the European market) to be released for the North American market as well. This 1945 film has never been released in its original form in the U.S.A. because the meticulously recreated seventeenth century costumes were too low cut to be acceptable to the American censors of the period, so the original version had to be re-filmed before it could find its way into North American cinemas. A North American DVD of this original release would therefore be a fitting tribute to a great work in this its diamond anniversary year.

Back in the day of 1983, I was 22 and really did not care about quality in movies like I do now at 60. There is a place for cheesy movies or drive in movies, but Cannon chose to skip and save on each budget to hoped to fund their next idiot production of knock off movies. I caught Wicked Lady 1983 for the first and final time after doing a Faye Dunaway search. When I saw the other movies were Cannon, I did not expect much. A period movie with customs was nice, but cannot compare to Richard Lester the 3 and 4 Musketeers and see for yourself the difference in quality. In defense of Michael Winner, he was a mans man director, meaning his style worked best with men who were stage actors and needed little or no direction, they could improvise out on rugged locations. Chato's Land a release by United Artist.

Faye Dunaway was 42 when she starred in this as the young ingenue's sister (or friend?). Age 42 in the 1600's was elderly and the woman Dunaway's character was based on died at the age of 26. Of course, extensive face lifts hadn't been invented yet. Similarly, Alan Bates was 50 when this was filmed - so at least in the same age bracket as Dunaway. These were roles were meant for young people so it's jarring to see Dunaway's blurred close ups. The nudity was puerile and unnecessary.