Le masque aux yeux verts

"The Wicked Lady" is a fabulous old film and is well worth seeing. I especially appreciate the writing, as the characters of Barbara is consistent and thoroughly captivating from start to finish.

Margaret Lockwood stars as Barbara, a woman who is truly evil. When her best friend is about to marry a rich and handsome man, Barbara maneuvers to steal him away from her. While this is very nasty, the vileness of Barbara soon becomes apparent. She cannot take being bored and country life can be dull. On a lark after losing a bet, she decides to pose as a highway man and steals back her jewels. And, in the process, she finds that it's exciting and fits the bill, for now, for adventure. She also discovers a new lover, a famous thief named Captain Jack (James Mason)...but even an affair with him isn't enough and he need for evil and excitement is only just begun! By the end of the film, she's murdered several and committed countless crimes...and hasn't learned a single thing from her experiences!

I have a different perspective about this film than the average person because I am a trained psychotherapist. When I saw "The Wicked Lady" I quickly realized that the writers created a fabulous portrait of what would today be labeled a Borderline Personality with strong Antisocial features. And, unlike many films of the era that try to write in a ridiculous conversion experience (where the evil person will inexplicably see the light!), they did NOT do this and remained consistent with her character. Overall, a magnificent film with a lot to commend it....excellent writing, acting and direction.

Judging by the IMDb ratings breakdown for this film, sixty years after its production it remains very much "a women's movie" with female opinion rating it vastly higher than the male across every age group; fascinating to see how the divide still lingers! For my own part, I've always enjoyed the Gainsborough melodramas, and this is probably the best of them thanks to its wonderfully acerbic script.

This style of film is basically the screen equivalent of the classic paperback 'bodice-ripper', with heaving bosoms, witty ripostes and dastardly deeds a-plenty -- which probably accounts for the sex divide. On the other hand, I'd have thought it had a good deal to appeal to the average male viewer... Frankly, I'm not surprised that this picture fell foul of the American censors (a fate shared with various other dramas set in morally dubious eras) in the 1940s: it's not just a matter of the amount of cleavage on display or of the protagonist's flagrantly shocking morals (since these are rewarded in appropriate fashion), but of the racy tinge to a lot of the dialogue.

I think it's the dialogue that makes this film really shine. Where "The Man in Grey" has a tendency to moralise or lumber, "The Wicked Lady" has a sparkling streak of humour almost throughout; watching it in the cinema, you realise for the first time just how many laughs there are as they sweep across the audience. But it also benefits from a galaxy of strong female stars, from the minor parts to the two leading roles: Patricia Roc pulls off the difficult trick of making her gentle, idealistic character both sympathetic and believable when faced with the formidable opposition of Margaret Lockwood's beautiful, amoral Barbara. Barbara as anti-heroine almost takes over the film, and manages to attract our sympathies to the extent that we find ourselves willing her deception of old Hogarth to succeed -- but ultimately she goes too far. Too far for Jerry Jackson, and too far for this viewer at least to feel anything but vicarious satisfaction as her 'bittersweet' ending turns entirely bitter. The Wicked Lady is bad -- bad to the bone.

My main gripe with the film, ironically, is with the happy outcome as shown, after the high emotions and dark ironies that have led up to the finale. I don't hold any grudge against the lovers at all -- it's obvious that all is going to turn out well once the truth is out in the open, and I'm all in favour of their union -- but the way that it is heavy-handedly interjected into the final frames of the picture creates a virtually bathetic anti-climax. That particular outcome really might have been taken for granted, rather than pasted on thickly at precisely the wrong moment...

Not popular with the critics,and I agree the critical chorus had a certain amount of truth behind it. True, the plot is full-blown melodrama and the characters are pasteboard figures. But what does it matter? Is not extravagant plotting with all its coincidences, unlikely twists and larger than life surprises the stuff that escapist entertainment is made of? Are not players of the calibre of Mason, Lockwood, Rennie, Jones, Aylmer, Roc and Stamp Taylor sufficiently personable and charismatic to breathe life into one-dimensionally written figures? Certainly, I think so (even if Mason himself did not, although undoubtedly one of the causes of his dissatisfaction was the role's brevity).

Leslie Arliss has written and directed with verve, pace and style, his script helped by a great deal of witty additional dialogue and catty repartee, his direction aided by Jack Cox's typically moody, gray-toned photography, John Bryan's magnificent sets, Elizabeth Haffenden's eye-catching Restoration costumes. (Perhaps some of the film's enormous success at the box office can be traced to its low-cut, period gowns. It would be hard to deny that Misses Lockwood and Roc fill their costumes most attractively).

The Wicked Lady has an undeniable sweep and a vigorous dash that carries the audience right along. It may be too excitingly plotted for some, but it always looks so terribly authentic, it is hard not to be drawn into the machinations of villainess Lockwood or sympathize with the careless, carefree vigor of James Mason's full-blooded Captain Jackson. A welcome cast of deservedly popular support artists help round out the movie's terrific production values. Aside from some obvious process screen effects, no expense has been spared. In fact, this Wicked Lady is lavish to a fault.

Wicked Lady is quite the racy little melodrama! For its time, I can imagine it was totally scandalous, but quite tame by today's standards. Margaret Lockwood is delicious as the "bad" Barbara Worth, and James Mason is totally sardonic and witty as her bad boy companion. The times when the two of them are together on screen are by far the most wicked fun (except, of course, when Barbara is contriving some plot to bend everyone around her to her silly will). Honestly, you can see the wheels turning in her head. Her performance and character was the prototype for that queen of all heroines, Scarlet O'Hara. At this time the film was made, English ladies were all atwitter about this genre of Rank Organisations films (of which The Wicked Lady might be the best). I suppose during the war, this type of escapism fantasy must have been just the ticket.

At the end of World War II the U.K. Gainsborough Studios had a very fine reputation based on the production of a long string of successful films, and backed by a list of very well known performers on whom they could call. November 1945 saw the release of "The Wicked Lady" - a film version of a historical novel by Magdalen King Hall which featured four of their major stars, with Margaret Lockwood in the title role supported by Jean Kent, James Mason and Patricia Roc. Initially this film was panned by many of the critics, but it was immensely successful at the U.K. box office and has now certainly achieved the status of a major black and white classic. I first saw it at quite a young age soon after it was released, and (perhaps largely because of my impressionable age) thought it must be one of the most sexy films ever released. However a few years later I saw it again and this confirmed my first impression. Margaret Lockwood was a great actress who participated in some 50 films during a career which spanned over more than 40 years. The Wicked Lady was a mid-career film made at a time when she was at the peak of her powers and she gave a memorable, if chilling, performance in the part of Lady Barbara Skelton The performances of her co-stars were perhaps not quite so memorable, but this was largely because the premise of both the book and the film was that the wicked lady had a very much stronger character than anyone else with whom she interacted, and it would be hard to seriously fault any of the acting.

For some reason this film never achieved comparable success in the U.S.A. Because the meticulously recreated seventeenth century costumes used for the original version displayed too much décolletage for the Hayes office, it was re-filmed a year after it was first released with modified costumes, specifically designed for the U.S. market. According to IMDb, Universal Pictures were the U.S. distributors; but the film does not seem to be widely known and may only have received a very limited distribution - IMDb do not even list a U.S. rating for this film. Thirty eight years later the film was remade under the same title in colour, with Faye Dunaway in the title role. As is so often the case in such circumstances I found the original version to be very much more memorable, but unfortunately it has now become very difficult to purchase in a form suitable for home viewing. A DVD in PAL format has been released in Europe, but I do not think it was ever produced in NTSC format - one hopes this was not because of continuing concern about the necklines.

This year is the sixtieth anniversary of the original film (which was never released in the United States) and I am now submitting these comments to IMDb to suggest that the anniversary provides an ideal opportunity to release a North American DVD version of it. Many classic black and white films have been released on DVD in this way during the past few years and "The Wicked Lady" would be a worthy addition to this list. Some of the listed prices for such releases tend to be rather high, suggesting that large sales of monochrome films are not expected today. If this is a concern the original version of the film could probably be paired with the 1983 colour remake in a double release which would provide viewers interested in the development of the modern cinema with an excellent opportunity to compare the film making techniques of two very different periods.