The Wicked Lady (1946)

This Gainsborough Picture costume drama stars Margaret Lockwood and James Mason with Lockwood playing the title role of The Wicked Lady. If you think this film bear resemblance to Forever Amber you'd be right. But Amber St.Clair is a Girl Scout next to the beautiful and treacherous Lockwood as Barbara Worth.It all starts with Lockwood coming to live with Roc who is about to be married to the propertied and nice, but rather dull Griffith Jones. Lockwood sees security there and when she sets her cap for Jones he and Roc don't have a prayer.But after that this minx craves excitement that Jones who is not just a landed squire, but concerned with social issues and ahead of his time that way. Lockwood after losing a precious ruby at cards then impersonates notorious highwayman James Mason and steals it back. Mason catches her and he should have obeyed his first impulse to kill her. But Lockwood uses her charms on him and the dashing Dick Turpin like highwayman is also hooked.This film really belongs to Lockwood. I've not seen too many people as amoral as Lockwood on the screen. Beautiful and deadly this woman is the equal of other amoral females such as Jane Greer in Out Of The Past and Anne Baxter in All About Eve. Four men who trusted her meet death at her hands.James Mason also deserves a mention. He's got quite the swagger in him as highwayman Jerry Jackson. Sad in terms of acting is competing with Lockwood who gets the woman's role of a lifetime, but he more than holds his own. If you like Gainsborough's English costume dramas you'll love The Wicked Woman.

Directed by Leslie Arliss,The Wicked Lady is based on the novel by Magadalen King-Hall.The unmistakable attractions here are the beautiful regency period costumes and James Masons deadly but fascinating love interest.On a peaceful country estate in England all is going well for the kind Caroline(Patricia Roc).She is due to marry handsome landowner Sir Ralph Skelton(Griffith Jones)and all looks perfect until she invites her cousin.Barbara Worth(Margaret Lockwood)accepts her cousins invitation but when she arrives she falls in love with Ralph and seduces him.The heartbroken Caroline(although believing his change of heart to have been all his idea)lets him marry Barabara instead.Soon though the restless Barabara becomes board and fed up with her dull family and friends.She takes to the road one night disguised as a Highwayman and steals some jewels.Going back to the same place again she meets notorious Highwayman Captain Jerry Jackson(James Mason).Mistaking her for a man he warns her to stay away but soon discovers her secret and falls in love with her.Barbara is soon leading an exciting dual life which soon turns deadly after she kills someone.Margeret and James have great chemistry and James although not on screen very much,makes a strong impression when he does,sexy,bold,cruel and not a man to be betrayed.It can only end in tears as Barabara must pay a harsh price for her crimes.Although some of it looks very dated it still stands up well today and is an enjoyable story with memorable characters.

Margaret Lockwood portrays a real 17th century tramp in this 1945 film which really has some amateurish writing when you think of it.Ms. Lockwood steals her cousin's fiancée on the day of the latter's wedding. She does it in faster mode than when Scarlett O'Hara stole Frank Kennedy from Sue Ellen in "Gone With the Wind."Barbara (Lockwood) could never be satisfied with one man. She goes from man to man. The woman has more lust in her life than can ever be imagined. She even cavorts with Michael Rennie on her wedding day.When she loses a brooch to her stuffy sister-in-law, she embarks upon a career of crime as a highway robber to get it back.This is a story of a woman who could not be with a man for a moment. James Mason appears as her new lover and fellow thief.Patricia Roc is sympathetic and overly sweet as Caroline, the cousin who lost her fiancée and stays on in the house. To think, we thought that Olivia De Havilland was such a sap in "Gone With the Wind." Roc even has her beat here.Of course, we can't allow for Barbara to get away with a life of crime as well as murder. She gets better with a gun than Annie Oakley did and kills 2 people along the way. Poor old, Felix Aylmer, she does him in via the poison route. What a fool he plays, quoting from the bible while actually believing that Barbara will reform.The ending is of course that Barbara gets what she deserves so that husband Griffin Jones should be able to go back to Caroline, the woman he should not have ditched to begin with. Imagine, Jones and Rennie were willing to switch women, but this was unknown to Barbara so she plots to put a bullet in Jones but instead, she gets shot by lover Rennie in her disguise as a robber!Come on. The writing here is actually churlish.

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...