The Wicked Lady (1983)

Wearing a hideous wig that looks like something that the men in the court of King Joseph in "Amadeus" would wear, Faye Dunaway gives a ridiculously over the top performance in this remake of the classic 1945 Margaret Lockwood film. The film realizes its hideousness from the opening shot of a rotting, hanging dead man having his brains eaten by birds and the shot if a topless woman running out of a barn with "Directed by Michael Winner" covering the woman's breasts. Faye is in the country for the marriage of her good friend which she quickly breaks up, marrying wealthy Denholm Elliott and kissing another man within his view at the reception. Within days, she's a masked bandit, robbing coaches for the heck of it, and taking as many lovers as she can.It's obvious that the covered face of the bandits is a woman's, and that the wealthy people she robs do not recognize them. Faye finds a rival bandit turned lover in the not so dashing Alan Bates, a decent character actor, but far from lothario material. John Gielgud struggles to keep his dignity among this trashy mess as the very religious old servant, but it's obvious that he's very uncomfortable saying and listening to the hideous dialog of the script. This is just a tacky throwback to period disasters such as "Joseph Andrews" and "Yellowbeard". Dunaway does get laughs, but in all honesty, they are a at her expense. In her early films she was soft as she played at being seductive, but there's a scary masculinity towards her villainous villain, making her scary to imagine in anything that requires the removal of clothes. Are we supposed to believe that Dunaway is angry at God for taking her mother too soon, hence her determination to kill the religiously obsessed Gielgud who hopes to reform her upon discovering her secret? Shots of secondary characters bare breasts and butts is gratuitous and just crude. Faye overacts in the most absurd manner, and the fact that the script refuses to see the truth about her (even when it's as close as a pillow to their face) makes this just the most asinine script ever written. This is the type of film that makes the audience want to have the Oscar taken back from, and her performance makes "Mommie Dearest" seem subtle. Bad movie fans will have a ball with this. Faye has a ball with the whipping scene, but the audience is the one who ends up scarred.

Spoiled Lady Skelton impersonates a notorious highway robber on horseback in the English countryside of the 17th century. It wasn't a bad idea for Michael Winner to stage a remake of Leslie Arliss' rollicking British adventure "The Wicked Lady" from 1945; Arliss' screenplay (credited here, along with Winner and others) was, after all, a tightly-wound and ingenious bit of sinful charade mixed with costume camp. But camp takes over in Winner's version, updated with bare bosoms and humping couples, while his star--the inimitable Faye Dunaway--is appropriately cast but coarse in the lead. Dunaway sports a whopper crop of hair and looks right in the flouncy attire, but she's manic and wild-eyed when all she needs to be is cruelly seductive (perhaps the ghost of "Mommie Dearest" was still dogging her?). Elsewhere, a British cast of elderly veterans and inept newcomers attempt to make the most of a wan situation, but Winner is too hasty in his pacing to allow anyone to carve out a genuine character. Either Winner or his producers (the un-esteemed Golan and Globus) were curiously obsessed with undressed wenches, though not even a whip-snapping catfight (lifted from Leslie Arliss' 1948 film "Idol of Paris") can breathe life into the tired, mangy final act. Cinematographer Jack Cardiff gets some nice shots of the evening sky, but his interiors are dreadful looking. Most of the nighttime heist action was obviously filmed in the daylight with a dark filter, causing even the story's high moments to look shabby. What a waste of an opportunity! * from ****

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.

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.