Elizabeth of Ladymead

That a blow to the head can propel you back into the past has become such a cliche it was even employed by Eric Cartman as a means to engineer a meeting with the Founding Fathers in the 2003 'South Park' episode 'I'm a Little Bit Country'

Sumptuously produced in Technicolor and set in a huge Georgian mansion in Surrey. It's heroine wears a succession of fabulous costumes in which she introduces each episode sweeping down the main staircase until No.4, when she's out seeing in 1920 drunkenly dancing on a tabletop.

This potentially provocative subject naturally sinks like a stone under the leaden direction of Herbert Wilcox; but you haven't lived until you've seen Dame Anna pretending to be a flapper.

Elizabeth of Ladymead (1948) offers star Anna Neagle 4 characters to play. In each vignette (she dreams after walking into a wall) she plays a wife awaiting her husband's return from war. The sly script is not so much about wars or even husbands (they never really change), but looks at how women have changed. All the women are named Elizabeth and all the stories occur at the country estate Ladymead.

The Crimean War wife is a proper little thing who bravely awaits and crochets doilies. The Boer War wife tries to stay active and becomes a suffragette. The WW I wife becomes a "lost generation" hedonist, and the WW II wife has become a capable business woman who turns the estate into a money-making farm. Neagle is terrific and almost shocking as the would-be flapper dressed in garish purples and greens and wearing war-paint makeup. The husbands are all played by different actors, as are the mothers (who move in during the various war years). Very entertaining. Hugh Williams play the current-day husband. Co-stars include Isabel Jeans, Edie Martin, and Jean Anderson. Oh, and the wall Neagle walks into used to be a doorway as seen in the earlier stories.

I loved this movie, especially Anna Neagle's performance as the four "Elizabeths", how each of these women coped with the men in their lives coming home from war and finding them changed, some for the worse (Betty is a bit of a tramp circa 1918!).

As a post war film, it works amazingly well, in particular the depiction of the attitudes of the soldiers expecting to step right in to their lives and surprise-no more "little woman"!

Great Equus Collection film-hope it comes out on video some day!

Elizabeth Of Ladymead written by English playwright Frank Harvey is one of those films which provides its lead with a once in a lifetime opportunity to create multiple characters. The following year Alec Guinness had the same opportunity in Kind Hearts And Coronets to do the same thing that Anna Neagle has here.

The first Elizabeth we meet is the modern one, a woman anxiously expecting the return of husband Hugh Williams home from World War II. He's at loose ends, not really sure what he wants to do after five years of action. She's got ideas and the couple do get into a heated discussion. When Anna bumps into a wall and gets a concussion, the other Elizabeths Of Ladymead appear with the same post war problems after the Crimean, Boer, and World War I.

The four vignettes reflect the changing attitudes of British society, especially female British society over the year. Neagle does a marvelous job in creating the three imaginary Elizabeths, the proper Victorian woman of 1856, the anti-war and suffragette of 1903, and the pleasure crazed flapper of the Twenties. Of the four the flapper Anna and her husband Michael Lawrence are the best and definitely the most dramatic piece of the bunch. The other two imaginary husbands Bernard Lee of 1903 and Nicholas Phipps of 1855 are nicely done also.

Neagle gets to display all her talents, she sings as well, a nice version of Love's Old Sweet Song in the 1903 story before she starts starting her husband with new ideas about women's suffrage and the fact she thought the Boer War was not a good idea. Absolute blasphemy in her Edwardian home of the time.

Definitely Elizabeth Of Ladymead is for fans of Anna Neagle.

It is little surprise that this film was a failure at the box office.Retelling the same story four times would strain the patience of a saint.It is extremely boring.