La dama perversa

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.

Heavy handed adventure with Faye (who followed up Mommie Dearest with this) robbing stage coaches in full period costume. The production is pretty decent, as is the cast, but the film is so woefully over-the-top that you just want to slap director Michael Winner sometimes. What could have been. And that nudity thrown in for no apparent reason is absurd. The scene where Faye whips the clothes off the wife of her lover at his funeral is classic camp, however. Best performance is given by Denholm Elliott, who plays Faye's put-upon husband. This is in the same league as the even more preposterous Mata-Hari...which even shares co-star Oliver Tobias! This one is good for a few laughs.

I can't understand the lack of love for this film. It is just a fun costume film with some mild action, all quite entertaining. It's colorful, full of British character actors in good spirits. It also has beautiful scenery from the British countryside and wonderful period costumes from the baroque era.

The film stars Faye Dunaway in the delicious role of Lady Barabara, a very unscrupulous and greedy woman. Faye enjoys herself but she could have let rip a little more, gone the extra inch to portray this very wicked lady.

On the whole an amusing matinée movie. I think if it had less nudity it could have been a film for the whole family, as it was a lot of kids who could have enjoyed it were left out. Maybe that's part of the reason the film wasn't a hit back in 1983.

Having viewed the original version several times, I thought it was great to have a modern up-dated 'Wicked Lady'. I had seen several other of Michael Winner's films, and though not a great fan of his, I found them entertaining. I was even more interested in the production when I was accepted as an extra for the filming of the sequences filmed on White Edge Moor in Derbyshire. It was an experience to say the least, but I did think the completion of the film would be much better, and even though I witnessed the nudity 'first hand', I wondered what all the publicity at the time was about! I viewed it on video just about a year after it was released, and again two weeks ago. I wish now that I had refused to accept my £40 payment, because it lacked everything, except me!

Another film I had the misfortune to pay money to see. Major over acting on the part of Alan Bates, Faye Dunaway, and Faye Dunaway's eyebrows. You also get to see two women, naked from the waste up, whipping each other.

Mrs. Dunaway, you should have known better.