Femininity in the Frame: Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema (Cinema and Society)

Femininity in the Frame

Cinema and Society series general editor: jeffrey richards Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present Anthony Aldgate & Jeffrey Richards Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema Colin McArthur The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 James Chapman British Cinema and the Cold War Tony Shaw Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids Sarah J. Smith The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western Michael Coyne An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory Annette Kuhn Femininity in the Frame, Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema Melanie Bell Film and Community in Britain and France Margaret Butler Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany Richard Taylor From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema Ewa Mazierska & Laura Rascaroli Hollywood Genres and Post-War America Mike Chopra-Gant Hollywood’s History Films David Eldridge Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films James Chapman Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film James Chapman Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces Andrew Moor Projecting Empire: Imperialism and Popular Cinema James Chapman & Nicholas J. Cull Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 David Welch Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity Jenny Barrett Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone Christopher Frayling Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster Geoff King Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema Andrew Spicer The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–1939 Edited by Jeffrey Richards

Femininity in the Frame Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema

Melanie Bell

Published in 2010 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2010 Melanie Bell The right of Melanie Bell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 9781848851597 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author

For my husband, Chris Curtis – ‘It had to be you’

contents

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Contents



List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

General Editor’s Introduction

xiii

Introduction: Women and the 1950s  1. Man-Made Women

1 15

2. The British Femme Fatale

41

3. The Comedy-of-Marriage Film

67

4. The Female Group Film 5. The Figure of the Prostitute

97 123

6. Female Film Critics

149



Conclusion: Reconfiguring 1950s Femininity 

173

Notes 

175

Bibliography 

201

Selective Filmography

211

Index 

215

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illustrations

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Illustrations 1. Pamela Devis as Olga in The Perfect Woman (1949)

22

2. The Perfect Woman (1949) – inspecting ‘the perfect woman’

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3. Ritter (Paul Henreid) transforms Lily (Lizabeth Scott) in Stolen Face (1952)

30

4. ‘Amazing – is it possible?’ – reproducing women in Four Sided Triangle (1953)

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5. Greta Gynt as the ‘Shady Lady Spiv’ in Easy Money (1948)

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6. Emmy entices David in Daughter of Darkness (1948)

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7. Kenneth More in Raising a Riot (1955)

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8. John Gregson consoles Peggy Cummins in To Dorothy a Son (1954)

84

9. The Female Group in A Town Like Alice (1956)

107

10. Glynis Johns and Diana Dors in The Weak and the Wicked 117 (1954) 11. Marissa’s room in The Flesh is Weak (1957)

141

12. Publicity Poster for Passport to Shame (1959)

144

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acknowledgements

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University for providing me with a period of research leave which allowed me to complete the manuscript. I am also grateful for an award from the British Academy Small Grants scheme that allowed me to undertake research on the film critics. I owe a debt of gratitude to Sue Harper and Bruce Babington who have both read drafts and given generously of their time and expertise. I’d also like to thank Andrew Spicer who lent me copies of films, Steve Chibnall who invited me to raid the British Cinema and Television Research Group archive at De Montfort University, and Viv Chadder for introducing me to post-war British cinema. Thanks to Mark Glancy who allowed me to present material on the female film critics to the Film History seminar at the Institute for Historical Research, and to participants for their extremely stimulating and perceptive comments. Library staff have been helpful especially at the British Film Institute Library, the British Library Newspapers, Colindale, and the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham. Photo illustrations are courtesy of the British Film Institute Stills, Posters and Designs, and the Steve Chibnall Archive. Every effort has been made to obtain copyright clearance where copyright holders could be traced. If any proper acknowledgment has not been made, I invite copyright holders to inform me of the error. Thanks to family and friends especially Guinevere Narraway, Martin Shingler (for tea, conversation and permission to have ‘Bette’ days), my wonderful daughter Eris Williams Reed and my husband Chris Curtis who has supported me in countless ways. Chapter Two is an extended version of an earlier article that ap­ peared as ‘Fatal femininity in post-war British film: investigating the British femme’ in H. Hanson and C. O’Rawe (eds) The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Chapter Four is an extended version of an earlier article that appeared as ‘“A Prize Collection of Familiar Feminine Types”: the Female Group

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Film in 1950s British Cinema’ in M. Bell and M. Williams (eds) British Women’s Cinema (London: Routledge, 2009). Chapter Five is a re-working of an article that first appeared as ‘“Shop-soiled” women: female sexuality and the figure of the prostitute in 1950s British Cinema’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 3. 2 (2006). I am grateful for the permission to reprint these here.

general editor ’s introduction

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General Editor’s Introduction In this refreshingly original and persuasively argued book, Melanie Bell challenges the oft-repeated view that 1950s British cinema was complacent, conservative and conformist in its depiction of women. She argues that the picture was much more complex and contradictory than has generally been admitted and she charts the ways in which popular cinema dealt with these complexities. She concedes that there was pressure on women to return to a normative pattern of marriage and family life, disrupted by World War Two. But she points out that at the same time there was an increase in the number of women going out to work and that there was an increasing focus on female sexual behaviour in the wake of the 1953 Kinsey Report. She draws not only on films but on a wide range of film magazines, press packs, Mass Observation reports and radio scripts to back up her analysis. Proceeding chronologically and thematically, and providing social and cinematic context at every stage, she examines a series of different depictions of women to support her claim of complexity and contradiction. She begins by looking at a group of science fiction films (The Perfect Woman, Stolen Face, Four Sided Triangle) which highlight male anxiety about post-war gender roles. She charts the emergence of a distinctively British femme fatale who is simultaneously demonized and celebrated in films such as Madeleine, Dear Murderer and Daughter of Darkness. She looks at the 1950s ‘comedy of marriage’ in which men are educated in their domestic responsibilities and learn to appreciate their wives’ contribution to the household: Raising a Riot, To Dorothy a Son and Young Wives’ Tale (all directed or written by women). She examines films about female friendship and same sex relationships (A Town Like Alice, The Weak and the Wicked) and about female prostitutes (The Flesh is Weak, Passport to Shame). She concludes with a consideration of the work of three female film critics (E. Arnot Robertson, Freda Bruce Lockhart and Catherine de la Roche), focusing on their consistent engagement with the cinematic depiction of women. The whole study adds a new, rich and revealing dimension to our understanding of the depiction of women in 1950s British cinema. Jeffrey Richards

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women and the 1950s

1

Introduction

Women and the 1950s The orchestration of consensus on the position of women in post-war Britain was the achievement of a deceptive harmony out of a variety of noisy voices … The orchestration was harmonious – in a peculiar way – in covering up what was really a silence; what was not said: the absence of women battered, of women raped, of women sexually attracted to women, of women in revolt, of women despised, of women despairing. (Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise) You know what a woman has to be? A cross between a saint and a dray horse, a diplomat and an automatic washing machine, a psychiatrist and a bulldozer, a sanitary engineer and a mannequin. (Raising a Riot, d. Wendy Toye 1955)

This study takes as its focus some of the variety of ‘noisy voices’ as they appeared in British popular film of the 1950s. This decade is lodged in the popular consciousness as a period of gender conservatism, a time when women enthusiastically returned to their ‘natural’ roles as wives and mothers and readily gave up the employment opportunities and increased personal freedoms widely enjoyed during the Second World War. Tessa Perkins speaks for many when she describes the post-war period as one associated with feelings of ‘disappointment … for socialists and feminists alike … that something “went wrong”’ leading to the ‘conservatism and puritanism of the “consensual” 1950s’.1 The popular image of women in the 1950s is of the ‘happy housewife’, content with husband, children and a home full of labour-saving devices, an image satirized in the horror mode by The Stepford Wives (1974) and critiqued aggressively by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), a text which laid the groundwork for second wave feminism. This understanding of the period’s gender politics is one that continues to have cultural currency. Andrew Marr’s recent television series History of Modern Britain (2008) characterizes it as a time when ‘every woman was a housewife’, whilst recent film productions set in the 1950s, such as Mona Lisa Smile (2004), are critiqued by the liberal press for glamorizing ‘old-fashioned femininity’ and for failing to depict the

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time as one of male backlash against women’s wartime gains; a position that similarly understands the decade as one of gender conformity and feminist failure.2 A stubborn image remains of the post-war years as a time of ‘tense domesticity and anxious conformity’.3 Domestic popular cinema of the time has fared no better and has likewise been dismissed as reflecting the decade’s wider conservatism. Commentators as illustrious as Lindsay Anderson famously wrote it off as ‘a period of dullness’ whilst for Charles Barr ‘the period 1952–58 was an extraordinarily dead one’.4 What emerged for British actresses during this period of dull film-making were, in Robert Murphy’s account, ‘pathetically trivial roles’ without emotional weight or intensity, with women characterized as either a Madonna or a whore.5 But, as Wilson’s quote reminds us, what is at stake here is the victory of image over reality and the successful mythologizing of the decade as a time when traditional sex roles predominated. The social and economic history of women in the 1950s is more complex and contradictory than the mythological image permits as it was shaped by, and fed into, wider concerns about post-war reconstruction and the emergence of a new social order. Whilst the popular consciousness may be dominated by the figure of the housewife, women’s experiences in the public realm were, throughout the decade, varied and diverse; shaped by age and generation, the availability of childcare, support given or withdrawn from husbands and family, and the types of work available to them.6 For example, women’s employment increased in the 1950s, particularly among married and older women who found work in the light and service industries and in the new welfare state. Whilst women might take up the role of full-time housewife and mother, that role had particular meanings that differ sharply from contemporary understandings. A housewife might exercise considerable agency in the creation of a home and consider herself at the vanguard of modernity.7 Likewise a mother, as imagined by the child psychologist John Bowlby, is afforded considerable status, elevated to a central role in the physical and psychological development of her child.8 Some women yearned for homes of their own and the chance to put down roots and experience a life that they understood as profoundly different to, and an advancement on, that experienced by their mothers. Other women mourned the loss of employment opportunities after the war and resented being shunted into ‘women’s work’, which was primarily low status and low paid relative to what for them had been a positive war-time employment experience.9

women and the 1950s

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The diversity of women’s experiences has led historians to increasingly characterize the decade as ‘a period of instability rather than unthinking smug conventionality’,10 with gender relations shaped by ‘[r]evision and negotiation, rather than acceptance and acquiescence’.11 These diverse experiences suggest a schism between image and reality and Alison Light raises the question of how to engage with the ‘subtle gradations of change within the period which might speak to the contradictory relations between what women lived and experienced and the official descriptions of, or prescriptions for, their lives’.12 How did British popular cinema respond to the ‘contradictory relations’ permeating the social imaginary? For many critical commentators domestic cinema was not a hospitable place for depicting femininity, with film production skewed in favour of masculine desires readily expressed in the war films that dominated the box office, whilst the female-centred melodramas that had characterized the 1940s were sidelined. For Christine Geraghty, who offers one of the few sustained accounts of cinematic femininity as it appeared in domestic cinema at this time, British film struggled to successfully dramatize what she terms the ‘New Woman’, a mythical figure through whom film-makers attempted to incorporate the overlapping discourses of ‘motherhood, sexuality, paid work and consumption’.13 Whilst the star personas of Virginia McKenna and Kay Kendall were able to capture something of this mythical figure, Geraghty concludes that British popular genres such as comedy contented themselves with presenting women as ‘childish, silly and vindictive or valorised and saintly’, with domestic cinema more broadly ‘locked into systems of gender that were out of line with the contemporary views about mature femininity that found a ready outlet in other forms of popular culture such as women’s magazines and fiction’.14 Despite providing some interesting film readings to support her claims, Geraghty’s is not a book-length study of femininity, a factor which both prevents it undertaking a more detailed analysis of gender relations and limits its claims for typicality. Domestic cinema was not ‘out of line’ in a wholesale manner with contemporary views about femininity and gender relations, but was at times, and in particular places, working through the myriad concerns and contradictions which impacted on gender. To be commercially successful cinematic representation had to negotiate – for the pleasures of the cinema audience – the shifts that were taking place in women’s roles in the material world. How it did this becomes more evident when we expand the contours of the cultural map to include genres such as

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science fiction and crime melodramas, and when we consider films where particular ‘agents’ sensitive to gender concerns had a role in the creative process. Nor were actresses confined to the ‘pathetically trivial roles’ that characterize Murphy’s understanding of the decade’s cinematic femininities. Actresses as diverse as Virginia McKenna, Glynis Johns, Diana Dors, Sylvia Syms, Yvonne Mitchell and Kay Kendall found rewarding cinematic roles as television presenters, secretaries, nurses, resistance fighters, prison guards and missionaries, as well as the obligatory portrayals of housewives and mothers (and these often more imaginative than widely credited). My motivation for revisiting the cinema of this decade arises from a clear sense that only a partial account has been offered concerning gender and femininity. There is another, more challenging side to British cinema and when we engage with that a different picture emerges. What I propose in this study is the first sustained examination of cinematic femininities in British popular film that is driven by an understanding of the period as one of instability and change rather than gender conservatism and the ready acceptance of normative femininity, and which keeps at the forefront of its consciousness Wilson’s observation of ‘a variety of noisy voices’ in relation to the position of women.15 By drawing across a range of genres (war, comedy, science fiction, crime, social problem) and focusing on key figurations (the prostitute, the femme fatale, the incarcerated woman) I will explore how British popular film (that is, mainstream narrative film made for a mass audience) engaged with the new ideas and contradictory understandings of femininity that were seeping into the cultural imaginary at this time. The first half of this Introduction covers social context and draws a road map of how women as a group were addressed, positioned and imagined within official discourses and in relation to the key areas of employment, marriage and motherhood. I then demonstrate how women’s lives disrupted the rhetoric of domesticity and maternity, for example through employment, and the debates about female sexuality which characterized the decade. Whilst this is not a comprehensive social history of the time, it provides a framework for understanding femininity and gender relations in this period that subsequent chapters are in dialogue with.16 It is within this framework that we can begin to position the figure of the woman in 1950s British popular cinema and the second half of the Introduction outlines the study’s methods and introduces the subject of the cinema audience, a key element to understanding popular film at this time.

women and the 1950s

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Women in 1950s Britain – The Dependent Wife and Mother The widespread understanding of the 1950s as a decade of conservatism in gender relations stems in part from the fact that the equality that was loudly proclaimed at the time was an equality that was predicated on difference. Vera Brittain’s 1953 statement that ‘women have moved within thirty years from rivalry with men to a new recognition of their unique value as women’ is fairly characteristic of how women’s equal position was understood at this time.17 This ‘equal but different’ ideology, with women and men experts in their separate and complementary spheres, was certainly not unique to the 1950s, but it did take on particular characteristics in this decade, particularly in relation to motherhood and the home. Post-war reconstruction focused on rebuilding the family, assumed fractured by six years of war during which time women as well as men had been conscripted, many children evacuated, and the single-parent family headed by the mother had, for many, become the norm. Women were central to this process. As Alison Light has argued, ‘femininity becomes one of the central pivots of post-war reconstruction within social policy and welfarism’; a femininity that was constructed as heteronormative and focused on marriage and the home.18 Beveridge’s social welfare policies, for example, were predicated on the ‘traditional model’ of the family with a male breadwinner and female homemaker. A woman’s entitlement to welfare support enshrined in the 1946 National Insurance Act was dependent on her husband’s claim, and working married women who chose to contribute to the scheme received a lower rate of benefit than men. Single working women paid lower contributions than men, the rationale being that they didn’t have dependents to maintain.19 Women’s role as the mother was supported through the introduction of family allowances (paid direct to the mother) and through a maternity benefit which was intended to both support families and stimulate the birthrate.20 Marriage was enshrined in the welfare state by making significantly lower provision for divorced or separated wives and for single mothers. Heterosexual marriage was the privileged site through which the legitimate nuclear family would prosper; indeed the argument put forward by the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce (1951– 55) that ‘life-long marriage is the basis of a secure family life’ is representative of the entrenched beliefs about marriage and the family that shaped social policy.21 The increase in the number of marriages

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taking place (from 59.7 per 1,000 in 1931 to 76.2 per 1,000 in 1951)22 needs to be set alongside a rise in the divorce-rate (from 1.6 per cent 1937 to 7.1 per cent in 1950). There was a strong sense within public policy that marriage was being undermined by the increasing ‘divorcemindedness’ of the population and that measures were required to strengthen its position as an institution and the corner-stone of family life.23 Marriage is a subject that I discuss in more detail in Chapter Three but it is worth mentioning briefly here that a feature of 1950s matrimony was the notion of ‘companionship’, with men and women having different and complementary roles and working together to create a marriage based on partnership, which in turn extended the discourse of ‘separate and equal’ to personal relations. That women were primarily imagined and addressed as mothers has become one of the most prevailing understandings of the decade. Whilst the centrality of motherhood to constructions of femininity was not new, what did change in this decade were the terms of reference. Physical care was to be supplemented with psychological care as theories about good mothering techniques and the effective socialization of children proliferated. From different psychoanalytical schools D. W. Winnicott, in a series of popular radio talks, addressed the ‘ordinary devoted mother’, whilst John Bowlby advocated that ‘mother-love … is as important for mental health as are vitamins and proteins for physical health’.24 It was this idea of seemingly continuous care, delivered solely by a devoted mother, that second wave feminists later critiqued as detrimental to the woman as it denied her any independent life beyond maternity. As the pre-war trend of smaller families continued unabated in the 1950s (the increase in the birth-rate in the immediate post-war years was temporary) the focus now shifted to giving the best possible care to children; a task for which women must be equipped.25 The belief in domesticity and motherhood as woman’s ‘natural’ outlet was enshrined in the educational policy of the period. John Newsom’s influential publication, The Education of Girls (1948), distinguished between a minority ‘elite’ of academic girls (considered comparable to intellectual males) and the majority of young women who should receive vocational training to equip them for their future roles as housewives and mothers. For Newsom ‘[t]he future of women’s education lies not in attempting to iron out their differences from men … but to teach girls how to grow into women and to relearn the graces which so many have forgotten in the last thirty years’.26 This view was echoed in the 1959 Crowther Report, which argued that ‘the prospect of … marriage should rightly influence the education of adolescent girls’,

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and domestic science remained a central feature of their curriculum.27 Educational policy assumed that young girls had a natural capacity to become experts in the domestic field and that they must be supported to achieve this role.28 Educating women for their primary role of wife and mother had the added advantage of producing a pool of semiskilled labour which would meet the demands of industry as reserve workers. The Working Woman Despite the rhetoric of domesticity and maternity and the fact that increasing numbers of women married (and at an earlier age) the reality of women’s lives in the post-war period was that a growing number of them worked outside the home. The 1947 Economic Survey, when reporting on the shortage of ‘manpower’ skills, argued that women ‘now form the only large reserve of labour left’ and called for them to contribute actively to the economy, albeit on the understanding that women would not ‘do jobs usually done by men’ and their efforts would be temporary, part-time, and would not interfere with caring for their young children.29 Employment rates for married and older women increased in the 1950s as the British economy expanded in areas that either traditionally or increasingly employed women: clerical work, light and service industries, and the caring professions in the new welfare state.30 The increase in female workers gave rise to much discussion of what was termed women’s ‘dual role’, most famously encapsulated in the work of sociologists Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein and their 1956 publication Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work. In this they propounded the ‘life-span’ model (grounded in middleclass norms) where women’s careers took a back-seat when children were young, after which they would return to paid employment, and concluded that women no longer had to choose between paid work and home-making as career paths.31 Although women’s entry into the workforce was based on the assumption that family came first (or would do when they had children), the increasing numbers of women working outside the home did not sit easily with official prescriptions regarding contemporary womanhood.32

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Female Sexuality In addition to women’s increased participation in the workforce and the significant changes which were shaping understandings of marriage and divorce, shifts were occurring in the personal and emotional realm that impacted on women. The publication in 1953 of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female caused a stir by suggesting that same-sex relations and masturbation might be more sexually fulfilling for women than heterosexual penetrative intercourse. Whilst Wilson has persuasively demonstrated that the Kinsey findings on female sexual pleasure were quickly ‘domesticated’, channelled into discussions about heterosexual monogamous marriage with simultaneous orgasm responsible for cementing the emotional ties between the sexes and strengthening the bonds of marriage, the Kinsey report (and other key publications) did open up for discussion the recognition and reality of female sexual pleasure.33 Literature on the subject burgeoned during the decade and theories of sexual behaviour were popularized through innumerable Penguin publications such as Mary Macaulay’s The Art of Marriage (1952), pamphlets and leaflets from the Family Planning Association, and the problem pages of women’s magazines. Increasingly through the 1950s ‘sexual potency in men and sexual responsiveness in women began to be seen as explicitly desirable qualities’.34 On the one hand this placed a greater burden on marriage (as the condoned site for sexual pleasure) as it led to both higher expectations and the potential for increased dissatisfaction. Women now had a duty and responsibility to enjoy sex and the potential to feel a sense of failure if they did not. On the other hand it is evident that discussions about female sexuality had entered the mainstream and were increasingly shaping the cultural consciousness. Publications on the topic ranged from advocacy of the ‘full and natural “vaginal orgasm”’ in Macaulay’s book, which worked with a model of female sexuality predicated on male need, to the somewhat more radical approaches propounded by Helena Wright, working in the family planning movement, who emphasized the role of the clitoris in achieving female sexual pleasure.35 For Wright ‘orgasm failure … is unavoidable if the clitoris is not discovered and correctly stimulated’ and sexual dissatisfaction in women is due to a model of sexual intercourse ‘which turns out to be based on the male instead of the female pattern’.36 As I demonstrate further in Chapter Five, women had to tread a difficult path vis-à-vis female sexuality, negotiating double standards and different attitudes to pre- and extramarital sex, but it is clear from the debates concerning not only female

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sexuality but employment, divorce and birth-rates, that women’s life experiences went beyond those described in official commentaries, and in a manner not widely recognized in the popular myths and narratives of the 1950s. What emerges from these accounts is a sense of the complex and contradictory social terrain that women occupied. Employment, marriage and birth-rates provide one account of the story of women’s lives, popular culture in the form of autobiography, fiction and film another. The novelist and critic Harriett Gilbert, for example, in reflecting on her 1950s middle-class girlhood commented on the innumerable ambiguous messages she received as a child. On the one hand ‘a great many “un-girlish” things were not only permitted but encouraged in the privacy of home … asking questions, putting my own point of view’ whilst conversely ‘[m]arriage and children were still, it was perfectly clear, the only safe goal’ for women.37 The film actress Sylvia Syms characterized herself as being ‘always in conflict’ in the 1950s, struggling to reconcile her ‘duty to be a gifted housewife’ with her aspirations as a ‘gifted actress’.38 Deborah Philips and Ian Haywood, in their study of 1950s popular fiction for women, demonstrate some of the literary devices for negotiating the contradictions and ambiguities that impacted on the female role. In relation to the subject of work and training, for example, Adult Education classes were increasingly popular with women in 1950s Britain, but they were conspicuously absent from romance novels of the same period which employed instead ‘a set of awkward narrative devices that allow her [the heroine] to experience the benefits of professional advice and training without searching them out’.39 Thus women’s increased expectations are recognized and their horizons expanded, but in a manner which does not advocate overt female agency. The popularity of these novels suggests that they succeeded in providing a space where women’s anxieties and uncertainties about gender roles and gendered subjectivities could be worked through and, as I will demonstrate, British popular cinema likewise engaged with femininity in some unusual and surprising ways. Whilst Light notes that ‘contradictory relations’ marked women’s lives at this time, contradiction more broadly was a feature of the decade, where a sense of duality shaped the wider consciousness of British society as it faced the upheaval of social reconstruction and absorbed into the social fabric the transformative events of the war. The experience of living in the ‘modern world’ – which was marked by rapid social and technological change – was both exhilarating and

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unnerving.40 Becky Conekin et al. in their study of modernity in post-war Britain use the term a ‘return to the future’ to characterize a nation that was both shaped by the weight of tradition and heritage whilst seeking to construct a new, meritocratic and modern society.41 The tension between the old and the new was perfectly encapsulated in the Coronation of the new monarch in 1953, an event where the old notions of empire were transformed into the new concept of the Commonwealth, and which reached the people of Britain via the new medium of television. For Conekin et al. the Coronation is emblematic of the ‘balancing act between innovation and tradition’ that characterizes British modernity and which was present in many areas of British society and culture.42 It is for these reasons that Hall’s characterization of the decade as one of ‘instability’ is valid, with a sense that the ‘moral pronouncements’ of the decade (as they impacted on marriage, female sexuality and gender roles) were ‘defensive reactions to a sense, whether correct or not, that the old constraints were falling away’.43 As this brief outline has demonstrated, women’s lives were broader and more expansive than the official prescriptions of motherhood and housewifery permitted. Women might have been addressed primarily as wives and mothers but they also entered paid employment in growing numbers, had smaller families and higher expectations of marriage and home life, and were increasingly able to reflect on their own sexual pleasure, expressing sexual needs and desires that went beyond reproduction. In sum, transition, instability and negotiation were features of gender roles in this decade with women and the wider society poised between traditional modes of thinking and the emergent new social order. The contours of normative femininity were clearly under pressure, being transformed and rendered increasingly ambiguous by the greater economic, social and sexual freedoms that many women experienced. The British Cinema Audience It is well known that the shape and structure of the British cinema audience changed considerably through the 1950s with annual admissions dropping to 755 million in 1958 after an all-time high of 1635 million in 1946.44 A response to a 1950 Mass Observation survey entitled ‘Why do they go to the Pictures?’ shed light on the reasons why cinema attendance had dropped, with less money, lack of time and the

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‘counter-attraction’ of radio, television and theatre as the most cited reasons.45 At a time when the attractions of home were pronounced, cinema struggled to compete, and the comments of one woman in the survey are fairly typical: ‘[t]o be quite frank with you I haven’t been since we had the television fixed … [m]y husband … comes home of an evening tired out … [w]e just switch on the television and relax, and often there’s a good play on.’46 There were important changes in the class, age and gender composition of the audience as the decade progressed. Through the 1950s, women’s cinema attendance dropped sharply with 50 per cent of Britain’s housewives reporting that, by 1957, they never went to the cinema.47 By the end of the decade the regular cinema-goer was increasingly young, male and working-class. The proportion of occasional cinema-goers (as a percentage of the total audience) rose steadily across the decade, from 14 per cent in 1950 to 40 per cent by 1960. This was a group where married couples in their late twenties and early thirties predominated.48 These occasional cinema-goers were characterized at the time by one social survey as ‘truly selective’; that is, motivated by the actual film being screened rather than a regular cinema-going ‘habit’.49 It is for this reason that, as Harper and Porter conclude, ‘the real path to commercial success lay in bringing the occasional cinema-goer back into the cinema’ and this was a group whose ‘ambitions and anxieties were more traditional and conventional’ than the majority who comprised the habitual audience.50 At a time when women’s habitual cinema attendance was in decline, the commercial success of particular films gives some indication of the tastes and preferences of lower middle-class and middle-class women. For a film to be commercially successful it had to appeal to both the habitual and the occasional audiences, with film producers gauging how to appeal to the more traditional and conventional preferences of one group whilst simultaneously addressing the appetite for more rapid social change held by other groups. The challenge to produce an open text is one that commercial film faces at all times. As Richard Maltby has demonstrated in a study of commercial Hollywood film and its ‘economies of pleasure’, films ‘presuppose multiple viewpoints, at multiple textual levels, for their consuming audience’.51 It is a film’s inclusion of ‘contradictions, gaps and blanks [that] allowed it to be consumed as at least two discrete, even opposing stories going on in the same text’.52 To maximize financial returns there always has to be the possibility of more than one reading, but this established requirement of commercial film was intensified in the 1950s where habitual attendance was no longer assured and ‘opposing stories’ were

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in high demand. Vincent Porter has suggested that one of the key features of the most commercially successful 1950s films was their ability to ‘offer alternative meanings to different spectators’: something that they achieved through sharply marked ‘textual compromises and ambiguities’.53 In a decade where the social order was characterized by contradiction and instability, not least in relation to femininity and the reconfiguration of gender roles, popular cinema had to work hard to address the differing needs of both the habitual and the occasional cinema-goers. It is for this reason that I have paid attention to a film’s popularity (i.e. box office success) where this can be demonstrated, and where possible have extrapolated from its success to suggest what appeal it might have held for women.54 This study focuses primarily on close readings of key films from popular genres but also draws from a variety of extra-cinematic materials such as newspaper and journal reviews, popular and trade magazines such as Picturegoer and Kinematograph Weekly, film press books, letters and radio broadcast scripts, all of which broaden our understanding of the production and reception of films. These sources are supplemented with contemporary social documents such as Mass Observation surveys, government publications such as the Wolfenden Report, advice manuals and newspaper articles, to give a sense of the social, cultural and psychological landscape of the era. Whilst space restrictions preclude a detailed focus on the question of creative agency in relation to film production, I do signpost the contribution to the creative process of women who were either overtly feminist (the director Muriel Box, the film critic Catherine de la Roche) or who delighted in treating contemporary gender relations with irony and satire (the director Wendy Toye and the scriptwriter Anne Burnaby). In this respect the study is informed by a feminist methodology that seeks to recover the contribution made by women to the British film industry and film culture at this time, and the final chapter on female film critics does this most explicitly. It also brings a broadly feminist perspective to bear on the films and to how female characters are constructed through, for example, clothing, space and narrative positioning. Each chapter is organized around either a key female ‘figure’ (the prostitute or the femme fatale, for example) or a type of film where women and their concerns occupy the centre-stage. Detailed readings of approximately three films form the basis of each chapter: readings which are contextualized in relation to both pertinent social discourses and other comparable films. By focusing on an extended analysis of key films rather than a survey approach, I have been motivated by a desire to

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engage with textuality and mise-en-scène – the visual style of a film that so often evades film historians.55 Rather than be overly constrained by the demands of decadology, this study utilizes the common perception of a ‘long 1950s’, which ran from 1945 into the early 1960s. The long 1950s can be divided into two distinct yet related periods starting with the immediate post-war years of austerity, from 1945 until the early 1950s, which were marked by the Labour government and the creation of the welfare state and which culminated in the 1953 Coronation. What followed were the years of the ‘New Elizabethans’ when, under a Conservative government, Britain witnessed a rise in consumerism, full employment, a restructuring of society along meritocratic lines and international decline on the world stage. This period ran until about 1963 when key events like the Profumo affair symbolized the emergence of a new more permissive society.56 It is across this time period that gradually ‘ideas of pleasure, enjoyment, and self-fulfilment replaced those of duty, responsibility, and loyalty to the group (be it family, class, or nation)’, a process which had profound implications for women.57 The six core chapters that comprise this book are organized in a roughly chronological order to give a sense of gradual change. Chapters One and Two cover the post-war period, the ‘age of austerity’ typically characterized in gender terms by an anxiety about ‘female selfishness’ and whether women would resume their ‘proper’ social roles.58 Chapter One explores the trope of the artificial or ‘man-made’ woman in science fiction and comedy of the period, arguing that cultural constructions of science intersected with the filmic representation of women to create a figure of male fantasy that speaks of an anxiety about men and post-war gender roles. The theme of male anxiety emerges strongly in Chapter Two which makes a case for a British femme fatale who, in contrast to her Hollywood counterpart, is located in the domestic realm and inhabits a sexuality that is at times repressed and virginal, and which is shown in some films to be as much a source of fascination for women as for men. Chapter Three shifts gear to the first half of the 1950s (1951–55) to focus on the popular ‘comedy-of-marriage’ film and the topical concerns of partnership and companionability between the heterosexual couple, arguing that in these films men are educated about gender roles and brought round to a respect for the feminine. In Chapter Four the focus centres on the middle years (1955–56) and the theme of female friendship and same-sex desire as it emerges in the female group film. These films bring particular challenges to bear on heterosexuality and the companionate marriage, whilst the portrayal

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of female agency is balanced by certain narrative strategies which attempt, with varying degrees of success, to refeminize the women in accordance with gender norms. The closing years of the decade are featured in Chapter Five, which explores the figure of the prostitute in the light of the 1957 Wolfenden Report and argues that it was through this particular figure that debates about pre-marital sex and new forms of female sexuality received their most comprehensive analysis. In Chapter Six my attention moves from film to film critics and, in a case study of three women writers working in print and broadcast media, I explore the contributions they made to debates about ‘women and film’ across the period of the long 1950s. By revisiting the cinema of the decade and engaging, in a sustained manner, with some of its cinematic femininities, I hope that a new and more rounded understanding of femininity will emerge – one which stimulates discussion and debate.

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1

Man-Made Women In this chapter I discuss three films from the post-war period that explore the theme of the male scientist and his creation of ‘the perfect woman’. All three films dramatize the theme of male-controlled reproduction and the creation of females to satisfy the personal needs – either professional and/or emotional/sexual – of the male scientist. Each film uses a different reproductive strategy – creating a machine that resembles a human, surgical transformation of an existing human, creating an exact copy of a human – but difference in technique or reproductive strategy does not result in difference in outcome. In all cases the project fails because the man-made woman is not wholly biddable, the men have misread their own desires and at all times have failed to actualize them in a functional manner. In The Perfect Woman (d. Bernard Knowles 1949) an elderly professor creates a mechanized doll in the image of his niece. The niece subsequently substitutes herself for the doll, which leads to a series of chaotic misunderstandings before the doll self-destructs and harmony is restored. Stolen Face (d. Terence Fisher 1952) follows the misguided fortunes of a plastic surgeon who, unable to have the woman he loves, recreates her face on a disfigured female criminal, with tragic consequences. In Four Sided Triangle (d. Terence Fisher 1953) a young scientist suffering from unrequited love develops a replicating machine and uses his invention to produce an exact copy of his would-be love. The facsimile spurns him and both perish in an accidental fire. Although the primary focus of these films is men and the male project, they find a place in this study because they highlight dramatically the contradiction between male fantasies and idealizations of women and female reality. In this respect they illustrate Alison Light’s observation (discussed in the main Introduction) of the contradictory relations between the official prescriptions for women’s lives and women’s own experiences. That cultural constructions of science interacted with the representation of women in an era of rapid technological change, highlights something of the space occupied by the female fantasy figure in the male cultural imaginary of the 1950s.

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Science Science and technology were important themes in the post-war years. Robert Jones suggests that ‘the prestige of science was very high in 1945’, not least because of its role in securing the war-time victory of the Allies.1 The military needs of the war (often referred to as ‘the physicists’ war’) led to the refinement of scientific advances in areas such as nuclear capabilities, radar and chemical development, which in turn had profound implications for exploitation in peacetime. As Arthur Marwick observes, ‘there was great enthusiasm for, and much talk about, the importance of science and technology to Britain’s social regeneration’, although it was less clear exactly how these scientific and technological developments should be harnessed.2 Science was, for example, central to the 1951 Festival of Britain where the Science Exhibition sought to educate the general public about scientific concepts such as atoms, whilst the Festival more broadly was driven by a desire to integrate science with the arts.3 Scientists themselves had significant status in post-war society and were looked to as experts whose knowledge was of fundamental importance in shaping the future. Writing in 1945, George Orwell captured this belief in his wry observation that: [a] scientist’s political opinions, it is assumed, his opinions on sociological questions, on morals, on philosophy, perhaps even on the arts, will be more valuable than those of a layman. The world, in other words, would be a better place if the scientists were in control of it … there are already millions of people who do believe this.4

Alongside prestige, however, was a certain amount of anxiety about the uses to which scientific inventions could be put. Ambivalent feelings about the creation of the atom bomb in 1945 were captured in the 1947 Mass Observation Report ‘Where is Science Taking Us?’ which described ‘widespread public anxiety about atomic bombs, a feeling that science was now out of control whereas it had formerly been a blessing’.5 Planning documents pertaining to the Festival of Britain likewise demonstrated an anxiety about the role of atomic weapons and a desire to use art to tame and balance the excesses of science.6 In an essay first published in the Tribune in 1945, Orwell again berated the intellectual community for failing to engage fully with the ramifications of atomic technology beyond the ‘reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb “ought to be put under international control”’.7

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The contradictory discourses that shaped understandings of science and technology were very much in evidence in the realm of reproductive science. Whilst eugenics had been discredited by Fascist practices there remained a concern about the long-term decline in the birth-rate and the phenomenon of ‘differential breeding’; that is, the lower classes reproducing faster than the middle classes.8 Socially acceptable measures to incentivize the ‘right’ people to reproduce came in the form of improved state services and childcare allowances (discussed in the main Introduction), which were deemed the ‘democratic route to improving the nation’s stock’ after the war.9 Medical expertise in this area was far-reaching, ranging from state-funded child welfare clinics to the widely disseminated teachings of the child psychologist D. W. Winnicott. Although radical advances in reproductive technology did not emerge in Britain until the 1970s, the strategies intended to shape the reproduction of the nation (or more accurately a particular privileged section of it) demonstrate the extent to which reproductive science had the capacity to infiltrate everyday life in the 1950s. It is this link between science and reproduction which is played out to extremes in the post-war science fiction films where men strive to do away with the real woman in favour of creating the ‘right’ kind of (fantasy) woman. British Science Fiction Cinema Given the status of science it is not surprising that science and scientists were a recurring feature in films throughout the period, in both the burgeoning science fiction genre and also more mainstream genres such as comedy, where Ealing’s The Man in the White Suit (1951) provided an acerbic comment on the consequences of science and invention. Relaxations in film censorship (which allowed film producers to experiment with more ‘adult’ themes) and a contemporary concern with cold war politics meant that British science fiction films broadly engaged with the themes of ‘social instability, the false promises of science and cold war threats, much like their American postwar counterparts’.10 Seven Days to Noon (1950) is an early example of the fear of nuclear development and the theme of the ‘mad scientist’, whilst The Quatermass Experiment (1955, first broadcast on television in 1953) is one of the best-known examples of the popular ‘invasion’ narrative. Alongside the scientist as ‘boffin’, typified by Michael Redgrave’s performance as Barnes Wallis in The Dam Busters (1954),

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was the figure of the ‘comic scientist’. In films such as The Mouse that Roared (1959) the figure was an amalgam of common clichés (unable to explain his invention, forgetful about everyday matters, endearingly ‘batty’) and ultimately the narratives propose that the wildest excesses of science can be brought to heel, or rather, as Geraghty suggests, ‘modernity can be outflanked by the traditional’.11 In addition to the many cinematic depictions of cold war fears, British science fiction began to explore the threat that women were thought to represent to the post-war world. As Steve Chibnall illustrates, a number of British films from this period combine ‘female monstrosity and otherness with male erotic spectatorship … [suggesting] fear of female sexuality with excitement about its possibilities’.12 These ‘alien women’ (in Chibnall’s parlance) range from the male-produced doppelgänger in The Perfect Woman to the alien-invaders of Devil Girl from Mars (1954) who abduct earth-males to repopulate their matriarchal planet. Interestingly it is the lower-budget films where these types of representation are most readily found. By the early 1950s, pulp science fiction literature, as Chibnall demonstrates, was the ‘repository for male [sexual] imaginings’13 and a parallel can be drawn with domestic feature-film production. Films such as The Perfect Woman, Devil Girl from Mars, Stolen Face and Four Sided Triangle were all relatively minor features, modestly budgeted, and were certainly not intended or imagined at the time as prestige productions. Four Sided Triangle and Stolen Face were made by Hammer before their famous horror costume cycle got underway in 1957. Stolen Face is a HammerLippert co-production, made in British studios with British personnel but drawing in secondary American stars and scriptwriters to produce a sharper product that would capture both the domestic and American market.14 A number of these films replay themes from American film noir, thus the plastic surgery theme in Stolen Face is a rehash of George Cukor’s 1941 MGM star vehicle for Joan Crawford, A Woman’s Face, which was itself reworked by Anthony Mann’s later, and much lowerbudgeted, Strange Impersonation (1946). Co-productions like Stolen Face enjoyed reasonable commercial success, in part because of tight budgeting, casting, and audience familiarity with thematic content. Four Sided Triangle comes after the Hammer-Lippert co-production deal had ended and by this time Hammer was producing science fiction/horror films, before later moving into the costume horror they became famous for. Both films were directed by Terence Fisher and have attracted (limited) critical interest which has primarily focused on the films as early examples of the director honing his craft before his

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later success as the quintessential Hammer horror director.15 The Perfect Woman is comparable in terms of budgeting. Made by Two Cities under the administrative umbrella of Independent Producers Limited (which gave producers a degree of artistic licence), the film is known to have been commercially profitable, not least because it was inexpensive to make.16 There is no case to be made for these films as lost or underappreciated masterpieces; these are modest films with modest budgets that were moderately successful both commercially and artistically.17 But it is striking that the theme of the alien women – specifically the man-made woman – should emerge so sharply at this time and in films that occupied a similar position towards the sidelines of the cultural map. It is highly probable that it was this positioning which permitted a more imaginative and direct engagement with the extremes of male fantasies vis-à-vis desire for, and control of, women, than would have been readily permitted in films with larger production budgets and higher-profile directors and stars. Men, Science and Reproduction Whilst women as invaders from outer space is one example of what could be conjured up in the male imaginary, man-made doppelgängers more readily represent the threat from within. The focus of this chapter is the attempt by men to reproduce females through scientific means, and the films demonstrate a concern with how male scientists use science in the quest for the ideal woman and female perfection as defined by those men. Their quest points to the gendering of science and a recognition of the impact of male scientists in the arena of reproductive technology. Reproduction should here be understood in the broadest sense as creating a facsimile of life; a copy which is made by a man without recourse to either God or woman. This can occur in many different ways in the cultural imaginary; the revitalization of body parts, the transformation of an existing being, the cloning of a human, or the creation of an ‘artificial’ person; that is, a machine that resembles a human. In most cases an in-uterine birthing process or female womb is rendered redundant. All such strategies are fundamentally concerned with circumventing the ‘natural’ role of either the female or of God in the reproductive process, and are predicated on an implicit belief that science can improve on nature. Examples of ex-uterine reproduction are prolific in Western culture and include, within Christian mythology, the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib, and within Greek

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mythology the creation of Athena, who was born from the head of Zeus. The literary tradition of the theme of revitalizing human body parts is evident in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), which dramatizes the creation of the male figure, whilst E. T. A. Hoffman’s short story The Sandman (1816) deals with the creation of a female figure in the form of a mechanized doll.18 The Frankenstein story has become a metaphor in Western cultures for any work or creation that becomes uncontrollable to its creator, who then typically rejects it. The fascination with male control over the reproduction of life readily translated first into theatrical adaptations of Frankenstein in the 1820s, and then moved into film. Versions of the Frankenstein story appeared in Hollywood as early as 1910, with Universal Studios’ later 1930s Frankenstein cycle being the best remembered. It was a favourite theme of German Expressionist cinema which produced The Golem (1915 and 1920), Lubitsch’s The Doll (1919), The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) and most famously Metropolis (1926), where Fritz Lang’s robot Maria clearly functions, as Lyn Phelan suggests, as a ‘deathly seductress’ to the men around her whom she provokes into causing industrial chaos.19 Typically within Western mythologies, the creation of the female by the male is perceived to be a lesser form of creation, and it differs in important ways from the male. Whilst Mary Shelley’s male creation is an intelligent and articulate being with considerable agency who becomes monstrous in Frankenstein’s eyes, Hoffman’s doll-figure Olympia is physically beautiful but practically mute and functions primarily as a passive agent in a feud between her two male creators. As Phelan argues, the stakes change when men produce women rather than other men; ‘the additional layer of difference more easily secures the distinction between male maker and female machine – autonomous subject and automated object.’20 This additional difference makes it possible for the man-made woman to function also as ‘the explicit focus of eroticized fantasy and often of a special kind of sexualized disturbance’,21 thereby gendering the nature of uncontrollability. There is certainly a tradition in science fiction of seeing sex work as an ‘activity that can be conveniently mechanized’, leading, in more recent films, to the creation of ‘[h]umanoid sex toys’ which range from the techno-women in Bryan Forbes’ The Stepford Wives (1974) to the robotic ‘comfort woman’ Pris in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).22 Whatever the male scientists’ stated intention for (and motivation behind) the creation of the women, which varies across the case studies offered here, her function as an object of male sexual desire underpins her creation. Like all Frankensteinian inventions, however, the women

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prove difficult to control and ultimately their male creators come to recognize the limits both of their own agency and scientific possibility, and that their vision of female perfection was false. The Perfect Woman The Perfect Woman was adapted for the screen by George Black and Bernard Knowles from a play by Wallace Geoffrey and Basil Mitchell which had already proved commercially successful in the West End theatre. Professor Belmon (Miles Malleson), a comedic variant of the eccentric scientist, creates a mechanized doll, Olga (Pamela Devis), modelled on his niece Penelope (Patricia Roc). The Professor hires two men, man-about-town Cavendish (Nigel Patrick) and his batman Ramshead (Stanley Holloway), to take Olga into society to ensure she is convincing as a real woman before the Professor unveils his invention to the scientific community. Penelope, in an attempt to secure a rare evening of entertainment, substitutes herself for Olga and the three characters decamp to the bridal suite of the Hotel Splendide, where chaos and misunderstandings ensue. The robot woman eventually selfdestructs, whilst Penelope and Cavendish fall in love. The film combines elements of science fiction with comedy, more specifically romantic comedy, and the trope of the star couple. This type of film is not without precedent in post-war British cinema where romantic comedies with a ‘fantasy’ theme enjoyed some popularity; Miranda (1948) and Blithe Spirit (1945), for example, centred on the disruption caused to the social order by, respectively, mermaids and ghosts. The Perfect Woman departs from that tradition by attributing creative agency to the male scientist rather than nature or the supernatural, thus linking the creation and its ‘sexualized disturbance’ more readily with male desires and fears. As a mechanical device the doll Olga is presented as a ready-made, complete entity that requires only to be switched on. She is clad in a strange outfit comprising quilted material, leather and metal rivets. The quilted material of the torso gives the impression of a soft doll’s body, whilst the leather material inlaid with metal rivets symbolizes the constructed nature of Olga, who is a combination of malleable and hard; natural and artificial. Through the means of the outfit the mechanized female body is simultaneously presented to us in a sexualized manner, with leather and rivets used to emphasize the shape and curve of the breasts. The presentation of the woman foregrounds her status as a

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1. Pamela Devis as Olga in The Perfect Woman (1949)

man-made object, the display of her ‘constructed-ness’ allows us to admire the skill of her creator and ensures that the audience is in no doubt that the figure is artificial. The purpose imagined for the mechanized doll is left vague and deliberately ambiguous, although a sexual function is hinted at. Much of the film’s humour derives from misunderstandings, most obviously between robotic and real women, but also at the level of language. The dialogue is peppered with double entendres, ambiguity and extended wordplay. Cavendish calls Ramshead ‘Buba’ because, as he explains to a confused Professor, ‘rams, lamb, sheep, baa, baa, see?’ Comedic misunderstandings occur between the Italian manager and the Swiss waiter of the Hotel Splendide; ‘You serve the food in the suite, you know where the suite is?’ ‘Si, rice pudding semolina.’ This constant slippage between what is said and what is understood extends to the doll when the Professor explains to Cavendish and Ramshead that he has ‘made a woman’ but doesn’t say she is a robot. His instruction to the men – ‘I want her tried out’ – is therefore ambiguous. For the men it has one possible meaning whilst for the audience, conversant with

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the Professor’s invention, it has another. As Mark Bould has suggested, the scene is inflected through a lens of ‘impropriety, of everything [the Professor] says in innocence being taken by the others to mean something else’.23 The Professor, who describes his creation as ‘the perfect woman’ (‘she does exactly what she is told, she can’t talk, she can’t eat, and you can leave her switched off under a dust sheet for weeks’), instructs the men to ‘try her out’ because the invention is useless if he has created ‘a woman who won’t work’. The men do not yet know that Olga is artificial and, believing her to be a real woman, respond with, ‘a woman must work, if she’s a working woman, scrubbing and all that’. Within the film’s established framework of linguistic confusion the suggestion of both domestic labour and sexual function has been made. As Bould had indicated, ‘the meaning of “working woman” shifts from “functioning robot” to “woman engaged in work” to “prostitute”’ in this scene.24 Through the masquerade of domestic appliance, the male fantasy of sex toy can be smuggled into the home. The Professor’s statement that Olga is ‘strictly speaking … of no sex’ is therefore not credible, and Cavendish’s later comment that ‘there won’t be a single home without one’ marries the domestic and sexual function into one object; perhaps the perfect wife? Having suggested Olga’s role as sex toy, the way is paved for this male fantasy to be played out to its fullest when, unbeknown to Cavendish and Ramshead, the real woman Penelope (on whom Olga has been modelled) substitutes herself for the robot-doll and is installed by the men in the hotel bridal suite. The substitution opens up a number of possibilities, one of which is the play between restraint and exposure of the ‘real’ female body. When the men first arrive at the laboratory to escort what they think is the mechanized doll they subject Penelope to a rigorous inspection; brushing her cheek, scrutinizing her nose and ears and lifting up her dress to fondle her lower limbs, whilst proclaiming the skill of her creator. The objectification and exposure of the female to the scrutiny of the male gaze is the method by which femininity is confirmed, and indeed an uncomplaining Penelope has to acquiesce to this scrutiny if she is to convince in the role of robot. Exposure here is two-fold: Penelope’s act of substitution (her fraud) and the sexual dimension of exposure. There is a question throughout the scene about how far exposure could go, most especially in relation to Ramshead. The batman removes the dustsheet covering Penelope’s lower body commenting ‘I wonder if …?’ and then pauses, leaving an unspoken desire hanging in the air. His actions, significantly, are halted by Cavendish, which introduces a class dimension to the dynamic,

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2. The Perfect Woman (1949) – inspecting ‘the perfect woman’

attributing lust and sexual danger to the lower-class male and restraint to the middle-class man. The threat/promise of sexual exposure is returned to later on in the hotel bridal suite. The men, intending to put the robot to bed for the night, remove her dress and reveal Penelope’s body (Patricia Roc) clad in lacy black underwear – a shot which was one of the key publicity images for the film. Alongside this male fantasy of the real woman as sex toy is the fantasy of material excess. In an earlier scene Penelope and the Professor’s housekeeper go shopping for clothes for what the Professor describes as Olga’s ‘trousseau’, another hint about her function as the perfect wife. Ensconced in a Bond Street department store they take their pick from the numerous items paraded for their inspection through three scenes which are all accompanied by dreamy romantic music. First we see expensive lacy underwear comprising a basque and French knickers, all available in a wide range of colours (‘pearl, platinum, silver, icyblue and petunia’). Secondly, an assortment of day dresses where the fitted jacket and expansive swirling material of the skirt evokes Dior’s

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‘New Look’, fashionable and desired by many British women at the time. Finally, luxurious evening dresses where Penelope picks out the salesman’s recommendation of ‘a model of stiff-ribbed silk in star sapphire’. Scenes of excess continue in the hotel bridal suite where Ramshead orders copious amounts of food (‘fish, chicken … two dozen bottles of beer’) which we later witness Penelope ravenously eating. At a time when there was considerable resentment that the government continued to dictate post-war consumption patterns it is not difficult to explain the appeal that such scenes of material excess would have had for austerity audiences. Food items at this time were still rationed and despite the very recent end of clothes rationing many women remained unable to access such luxurious new garments produced with extravagant amounts of material. The shopping sequences indulge a feminine fantasy of consumption and allow spectators to be immersed in a world of plenty. Whilst audience pleasure is addressed through scenes of material excess, it is also derived from a positioning as ‘knowing spectators’ vis-à-vis the artificial woman. In contrast with the two male players (Ramshead and Cavendish), the audience is fully conversant from the outset with Penelope’s act of substitution, and the presentation of Penelope as the robot plays on the audience’s knowledge that she is not a robot. The two women are distinguished by clothing (Penelope’s lacy black underwear differs markedly from Olga’s more fetishistic body armour), by casting (Pamela Devis in the role of Olga is made up to look like Patricia Roc’s character Penelope) and through the frequent moments where Penelope shifts out of the role of artificial woman and back into the role of real woman. In the bridal suite she eats and drinks (a function the robot cannot perform), leaving the men, who have been temporarily distracted, with inexplicably empty dinner plates. Close-ups of her face depict her licking her lips at the promise of an exotic dessert (glace à la maison) and nervously biting her lip when her dress is removed. There is never any attempt to fool the audience or confuse them about which woman is real and which is artificial. In this respect there are parallels with cross-dressing narratives within the comedy genre. As Annette Kuhn has demonstrated, these narratives, typified in films such as Some Like It Hot (1959), play on a known disjunction between clothes and body, drawing attention to sexual difference as socially constructed and gender identity as performative.25 In many mainstream films this dynamic is often conservative, allowing audiences to enjoy a flirtation with transgressions of gender and sexuality whilst remaining conversant with the ‘fundamentalism of the body … as final arbiter of a basic

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truth’.26 Penelope’s performance of robotic femininity allows norms of social decorum to be transgressed (exactly how many layers of clothing will the men remove?) whilst the fundamentalism of her ‘real’ human body means both that she has something to reveal (unlike the robot, which is made up merely of ‘gimbals’), and that she can stop the male inspection should it go ‘too far’. Spectatorial pleasure for a knowing audience is derived from this titillation and from the safe play between artificial and real womanhood. Both women are involved in performative acts of femininity and are subjected to male control, but in different ways both women refuse to comply with male expectations. Olga needs constant instruction to function (‘sit’, ‘stand’ ‘step up’; she is the automated object of Phelan’s description), a situation that requires Cavendish and Ramshead to adapt their discussions to insert the required verbs into the conversation. Her instruction manual is too complex to readily understand and she requires of her operators a significant investment of labour and effort to function. Cavendish and Ramshead are forced to interact with her in ways that are impossible to sustain and which ultimately impoverish their quality of life to the extent that, paradoxically, they are robotized through their attempts to control her. This theme of Man’s dehumanization by the demands of machinery is long present in cultural representation, Metropolis and Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) for example. Such concerns had contemporary relevance in post-war British society where the development of new technologies and the drive to increase industrial efficiency and productivity raised many fears and anxieties, with commentators such as George Orwell expressing concern about the ‘excessive mechanization of life’ and its impoverishment of the human spirit.27 The robotization of Cavendish and Ramshead certainly suggests, albeit in a humorous manner, how these anxieties were permeating British films.28 Olga eventually self-destructs in spectacular fashion: running out of the hotel room with a plume of smoke behind her. The man-made machine-woman is destroyed in preference for the real woman, who is presented as the epitome of feminine perfection. Olga explodes when the word ‘Love’ is spoken; something which the Professor had warned about but given no explanation for. ‘Love’ is presented as the emotional variable that science cannot rationalize or predict and it stands as a comment on the male scientist’s failure to integrate science successfully into the social realm. Penelope may attain the status of ‘the perfect woman’ and be rewarded with the promise of marriage at the film’s close, but she is not altogether compliant with male demands

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or male norms of femininity. Playing the role of robot allows her to transgress the role of obedient niece who is expected to comply with her uncle’s orders that she remain at home. There is a clear sense of masquerade as Penelope performs the roles of artificial woman and real woman, crossing effortlessly between the two. The shift between the roles, unwitnessed by the male characters but for the pleasure of the audience, creates a space which she occupies as an unruly woman. In Kathleen Rowe’s assessment, the unruly woman of comedy is marked by ‘excess and outrageousness’ and motivated by a desire to satisfy her needs.29 Whilst Penelope, played by British cinema’s sexy, bouncy girl-next-door Patricia Roc, might initially seem to sit awkwardly in a spectrum of unruly femininity that encompasses, in Rowe’s schema, Mae West and Miss Piggy, the comparison is illuminating. Penelope causes considerable chaos in the bridal suite when she steals food from the men’s plates. Not only does this lead to much head-scratching and arguing amongst the men but it provides the occasion for close-ups of Penelope engaged in ‘transgressive’ behaviour; drinking soup directly from the bowl, gobbling chicken and cramming more food into her already full mouth, allowing morsels to drop onto her dress. Penelope gratifies her needs when and where she can and engages in behaviour that clearly fails to comply with normative femininity. Her performance as the mechanized doll points to the ideal of perfect womanhood – biddable, silent and without needs – as a fallacy that exists only as a male fantasy figure. The film’s popularity can be accounted for by its adept handling of the perennial themes of pretty girls, titillation and mistaken identities, with more contemporary concerns regarding new technologies, assertive women and a lack of male control, all treated in a manner that provides pleasure and reassurance for audiences. The film’s ‘A’ certificate suggests a broad appeal and the very positive review in trade paper Kinematograph Weekly (played with ‘zest’ and ‘accurate timing’, with exhibitors advised to ‘Grab it; its formula has never failed’), positioned the film for popular success.30 The positive response it received in the pages of Picturegoer suggests it found its audience. Picturegoer reviewed the film as ‘simple stuff packed with a lot of laughs, some of them good ones’, and noted that although the film had been kept from show houses ‘Pat’s fans’ had followed her to the suburban cinemas to watch her latest film.31 Reader Derek Lowe of Essex won second prize of 10 shillings and sixpence for his letter to Picturegoer advising ‘Dismal Jimmies’ pronouncing the death of British screen comedy to watch this ‘rollicking new comedy’ which is being ‘lapped up’ by audiences.32 The

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film addresses the needs of audiences that can be broadly categorized along gender lines. Olga is at one point referred to by the Professor as a ‘Dummy … indistinguishable from a female of the human species’. Comedy allows for the expression and then subversion of such thinly veiled misogynist statements. Scenes of Penelope in lacy underwear (heavily used to promote the film) are set alongside scenes showcasing desirable feminine items of clothing. Men are shown to be absurd in their desires and romantic love disrupts the male project. Both of these themes also emerge in Stolen Face. Stolen Face – the Plastic Surgeon as Pygmalion Figure In Stolen Face (1952), Philip Ritter (Paul Henreid) is a dedicated and successful plastic surgeon with a thriving private practice. He also undertakes charity work in the form of reconstructive surgery at Holloway women’s prison, as he believes that facial disfigurement plays a part in female criminality. He falls in love with Alice Brent (Lizabeth Scott), a concert pianist who returns his love but is engaged to another man and decides to honour that commitment. Distraught, Ritter resolves to recreate Alice’s face on an inmate of the prison, Lily (Mary Mackenzie before surgery, played by Scott post-surgery), who was disfigured in the Blitz and has been a hardened criminal ever since. Ritter marries Lily in the belief that he can rehabilitate her, but her criminal tendencies remain and, to make matters worse, Alice returns and is now free to marry Ritter. Lily discovers that she bears Alice’s face and in a drunken fury she challenges Ritter, accidentally falling to her death in front of the reconciled Ritter and Alice. The narrative is structured around a portrayal of male desire, the fantasies held about ‘woman’ in the male cultural imaginary, and the contradictions that real women and their experiences bring to bear on that fantasy. Male desire is here interwoven with scientific pursuit. Ritter’s role as a plastic surgeon has much in common with the scientist as individual genius figure as it draws together the qualities of ‘the pioneer, the scientist, the idealist, the creator and the aesthete’ to create a very particular professional identity (indeed one that would as accurately describe Dr Frankenstein).33 Plastic surgery and particularly cosmetic plastic surgery is ‘one of the most “gendered” of all medical specialties’ with predominantly male surgeons operating on female bodies.34 Ritter, significantly, only extends his charitable services to the women’s prison. This indicates a belief that facial disfigurement is more

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socially disabling for women than men as they are more bound by norms of physical beauty, but Ritter’s work also allows him to pursue his search for female perfection; the archetypal Pygmalion trope. Ritter recreates the face of his ideal woman on the prison inmate Lily but then, in a manner similar to Dr Frankenstein, rejects his creation. In this way Ritter is able to avoid the reality of real women whilst idealizing femininity, a state which is a motivating factor for all men but one which plastic surgeons are uniquely placed to realize. Ritter’s preference for fantasy over reality is evidenced both by his choice of Alice, who is an unobtainable woman, and the manner in which he approaches Lily as a project for the expression and actualization of his desires. Lily’s disfigurement in the Blitz presents her as a worthy subject for cosmetic surgery (unlike the rich, vain women that Ritter turns away from his private practice) whilst her status as a working-class woman and repeat offender positions her as the ideal figure to prove Ritter’s theories about the nature of female criminality. In an intertextual nod to the criminal brain inserted into Frankenstein’s creature, Lily’s criminality places her beyond society and allows Ritter to manipulate her as he pleases. Ritter initially wields complete power over Lily, who he subjects to rigorous scrutiny as he prepares to construct her new face. First he photographs her in close-up, with additional lighting, and then he inspects the blown-up photographs at length in his laboratory, with the assistance of a magnifying glass. During this protracted process he shuns social life, preferring to spend time in his clinic with the photographs and a pre-operative clay bust he has modelled for Lily’s reconstructive surgery. If she is to gain her new face Lily must acquiesce by obeying Ritter’s instructions to keep quiet and sit still whilst he examines her. The photographs are preferable to the reality of an inquisitive Lily. Within a psychoanalytic model, Freud argues for a ‘substitutive relation between the eye and the male member … [and a] connection between fears about the eye and castration’.35 Ritter clearly gains scopophilic satisfaction from these activities; subjecting Lily as an objectified other to a controlling gaze that allows him to counter anxiety about a loss of male power and control. As with The Perfect Woman, the male gaze is the method by which idealized femininity is confirmed. Lily is never consulted about her new image but is, not surprisingly, curious and asks, ‘what am I going to look like?’ Ritter replies with vague comments (‘I don’t know yet’), eventually concluding that she will look like ‘everything you’ve ever wanted to look like’. What transpires, of course, is that Lily looks like everything Ritter wants in a woman; that is, Alice.

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3. Ritter (Paul Henreid) transforms Lily (Lizabeth Scott) in Stolen Face (1952)

Plastic surgery is only one aspect of Lily’s reconfiguration as Ritter’s fantasy of female perfection. In order to completely transform Lily in the image of Alice, Lily must acquire Alice’s clothes, jewellery, hairstyle, manners and decorum; in essence her middle-class femininity. In a makeover motif reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Scottie’s transformation of Judy into Madeleine, Ritter has very clear ideas about what he wants. Following the ‘unveiling’ of Lily’s new face in the surgery Ritter escorts her to an upmarket boutique where he proceeds to select the ‘correct’ shoes, evening gowns and dresses, vetoing unsuitable suggestions made by Lily, who repeatedly picks out the ‘wrong’ items. The process of acculturation into bourgeois norms is then completed by an evening at the opera. Whilst the transformation of the woman takes place here as much through learning and acculturation as through surgical means, Ritter, as a Pygmalion figure and agent of change, is well qualified to undertake both tasks and ensure that the acquisition of preferred femininity results in upward social mobility for Lily.

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Ritter’s attempt to take his creation from the scientific domain into the social realm is ultimately doomed and he quickly rejects the creation, which has failed to live up to his fantasy. Lily continues to prefer jazz bars to high culture, gaudy rather than ‘tasteful’ jewellery, and over-runs Ritter’s house with an assortment of low-life friends and lovers, acting as the ‘sexualized disturbance’ of Phelan’s description. She changes from her initial acquiescence to Ritter’s requests to become a form of monstrous-feminine; loud, uncontrollable, tasteless. Ritter cannot understand Lily’s behaviour, proclaiming her to have ‘everything any woman could want’ and he recommends her for psychiatric treatment. His attempts to make her responsible for her failure in his eyes are cut short, first by the medical director of the prison who concludes ‘maybe you left love out of your calculations’, and later by Lily. Her explanation about why she stole an expensive brooch – ‘didn’t you ever see something you wanted so badly you just had to have it?’ – points to Ritter’s guilt and culpability. Whilst Lily exhibits an insatiable appetite for furs, jewellery and drinking and fails to conform to Ritter’s expectations, Ritter is no more able than her to occupy the moral high ground. In his theft of Alice’s face and his marriage to Lily to satisfy his own desires, he has proven himself equally guilty of a failure to exercise restraint. Ritter’s preference for an ideal of femininity is recognized by Lily, who catches him gazing at the reconstructive bust of what she now recognizes to be Alice. Lily dashes the likeness to the ground and her statement, ‘you wanted this face, you’re gonna live with it’, highlights the poverty of this male vision and the misreading of his desires. The film has much to say about the male desire for female compliance and female usurpation of those desires: themes likely to have a broad gendered address for audiences. Narrative space is created for the articulation of male desires whilst those desires are ultimately shown to be fantastical and unsustainable in the real world. There are other elements in the film that suggest a more direct address to a female audience. For example, the casting of Austrian actor Paul Henreid in the role of Ritter builds on his high-profile roles in Casablanca and Now Voyager (both 1942) which had established him as a credible romantic male player in Hollywood. Interestingly, in both these films he has romantic credentials (tall, handsome, exotic ‘otherness’) but is something of a secondary character when placed alongside a stronger woman (Bette Davis in Now Voyager) or a more robust male (Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca). This hints at a weakness underlying his romantic masculinity. These aspects are well suited to his characterization in Stolen

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Face, where Ritter is convincing as a romantic hero who goes to great lengths to pay homage to his love for Alice, but is conversely shown to be vulnerable, acting in an ill-considered manner and coming to regret those actions. Henreid’s star persona aptly signifies both Ritter’s weakness and his romantic intent, suggesting that whilst his actions were monstrous his romantic inclinations were not without value. In addition to casting, female audiences were courted via the numerous lavish costumes worn throughout the film by Lizabeth Scott. The outfits were designed by one of Hollywood’s leading costume designers, Edith Head, whose work was garnering Academy Awards at this time.36 Scott parades a number of outfits ranging from Alice’s smart tailored day suits and black wool dress accessorized with patent leather belt, to Lily’s more risqué party gowns and sumptuous full-length furs. Scott, as Lily, accompanies Ritter to the opera wearing a floor-length cream jacquard bustier-style evening gown with full skirt. Later, as her confidence grows, she appears in another full-length bustier-style evening dress, this time in clinging black satin which displays her curvaceous body, and in this way signals how Ritter’s hold over her has loosened. Alice’s profession as concert pianist likewise demands show-stopping gowns, with the display of décolletage set against the full skirt as befits her middle-class status and her embodiment of a more restrained femininity than Lily. Alice’s profession also legitimizes the lush ‘romantic’ score (primarily strings and piano) that accompanies the film. Written by Malcolm Arnold, a prolific and highly respected composer who wrote scores both for British genre films and more prestigious productions such as David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, for which he won an Academy Award), a recurring motif is the tune played by Alice when Ritter first declares his love for her, a love she cannot return as she is engaged to another. This musical motif returns to haunt Ritter in key scenes; as he works on reconstructing Lily’s face in the manner of Alice, and later when Alice, now released from her engagement, returns to Ritter, only to discover he has married Lily. The motif gives voice both to the desire between the romantic leads and the thwarting and repression of that desire by social convention and by Ritter’s flawed vision. Music of this nature was a frequent feature of romantic melodrama at the time and suggests that the film’s producers were eager to capture a female audience. Likewise the ‘makeover’ scene where Ritter takes Lily shopping is a recurring motif in female-centred drama. As Rachel Moseley has demonstrated, this ‘narrative of transformation is a staple of women’s culture’ a ‘basic cultural trope … [that] feeds into feminine culture in

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endless ways’.37 It typically includes ‘before and after’ scenes where the physical appearance of a young woman is transformed through dressfittings or clothes-shopping sequences, and ‘coming out’ moments such as balls, dances and other occasions of increased visibility where the new woman showcases her acquisition of preferred femininity in exchange for public approval.38 As I have demonstrated, Lily’s makeover is not only surgical; the boutique sequence (comparable to that in The Perfect Woman) allows for the prolonged display of desirable feminine objects – evening gowns, high-heeled shoes – and is clearly addressed at female audiences who would be well versed in this motif of feminine fantasy. Critical reviews of the film recognized its feminine address with Kinematograph Weekly classifying it as a ‘romantic melodrama with a deep clinical fringe’ and Today’s Cinema as ‘fair popular entertainment, mainly appealing to women’, whilst exhibitors were advised by the film’s production company to promote the film’s romance angle through ‘catch lines’ such as ‘To capture love he cheated nature’.39 The film capitalizes on a number of gendered assumptions about the audience. It articulates a male project concerned with fear and fascination with the feminine and male anxiety about a perceived lack of control vis-à-vis women that it attempts to redress through an active male gaze. A male anxiety about female agency and women’s choices resonates with an understanding of a post-war consciousness where it was not automatically accepted that traditional gender roles would be resumed. The quest for female perfection is actualized through science but also through dress and costume and, in this respect, a range of feminine reading competences are courted. In addition to visual and aural stimulus there is a certain amount of female spectatorial pleasure to be gained from witnessing male fantasies about women as fantasies, and the disruption that real women can bring to bear on the male project. Male idealizations of women and the obsessive and disturbing extremes implemented by one man to actualize his desires are themes evident in Four Sided Triangle, although there the focus of that obsession is as much another male as it is the unattainable woman. Four Sided Triangle In Four Sided Triangle, Bill (Stephen Murray), Robin (John Van Eyssen) and Lena (Barbara Payton) are childhood friends. Robin comes from a wealthy family whilst Bill is an orphaned boy who is befriended and tutored by the local medic, Dr ‘Doc’ Harvey (James Hayter), who

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also acts as the film’s narrator. After studying science at university, Bill and Robin return to their small village and set up a laboratory where they succeed in their goal of creating a replicating machine which can duplicate matter, thus bringing to an end human want. Robin and Lena fall in love and Bill, who has always loved Lena, persuades her to allow him to produce a copy of her for himself. Unfortunately the copy, Helen, has Lena’s mind and therefore she too loves Robin. Confused and unhappy, Helen tries to kill herself. In an attempt to resolve the situation Bill suggests that he erase Lena’s memories from Helen’s mind, but during the procedure a fire breaks out in the laboratory killing both Bill and Helen, whilst Lena survives to be successfully reunited with Robin. In the film’s opening sequence Doc observes that ‘There is often less danger in the things we fear than in the things we desire’, setting up the film’s central theme of male desire and the destructiveness of that desire. Bill is a driven individual and, in a manner similar to Ritter, his desire is interwoven with scientific pursuit. He pursues science for its own sake and is largely uninterested in the implication and wider application of the replicator, commenting, ‘what’s there to think out, we’ve done it, that’s all that matters’. Conversely Robin tempers this view with, ‘not quite Bill, we’ve a responsibility to ourselves and the world’. Robin’s ethical code, shared by his father Sir Walter, who has funded the research, allows for a direct confrontation with post-war concerns about science and a fear about how its advances will be used. Sir Walter recognizes the replicator’s potential as a ‘secret weapon’, able to reproduce not only the good things in life such as medicines but also ‘atom bombs and poison gas’, and insists the men work in conjunction with ‘the proper authorities’. Sir Walter acknowledges that Bill, not Robin, is motivated by what he calls ‘the spirit of detached scientific curiosity’, and for this reason proper restraint must be exercised. Unfortunately Bill proves unable to restrain himself and the film’s two moderating males, Dr Harvey and Sir Walter, may act as the voice of ethical responsibility by questioning the scientist’s actions, but ultimately have little real power and are impotent in the face of Bill’s overwhelming desire to realize his creative vision. In part Bill is motivated to create a new Lena because he desires to have what Robin has and seeks to actualize his desires for the unobtainable woman, but also because the project gives him the potential to extend the scope of the reproducer beyond its initial capacity to duplicate inert matter. The woman that he reproduces and names Helen is intended as his lover and playmate. Whilst Lily fails to please Ritter because she

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4. ‘Amazing – is it possible?’ – reproducing women in Four Sided Triangle (1953)

is too different from Alice, Helen cannot please Bill because she is too similar to Lena. Helen possesses Lena’s memories and emotions; thus the woman amounts to more than the malleable body or empty vessel envisaged by the male scientist who has, again, forgotten to account for the whole woman. Helen’s presence creates anxiety for all the men. She causes social embarrassment to Doc, who is initially confused by her possession of Lena’s memories. Bill’s attempt to integrate his scientific experiment, Helen, into the social realm via a seaside holiday is doomed to failure. Helen, tormented by Lena’s memories and love for Robin, attempts suicide and later sits impassively in front of her bedroom mirror, mechanically brushing her hair in a parody of learnt female behaviour. Sue Harper has suggested that Helen is one of a number of female protagonists in low-budget British science fiction films at this time who are ‘directed … to use none of the normal resources of gaze, expression and response’, the lack of which speaks of an anxiety about ‘female behaviour which cannot be coded according to predictable

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rules’.40 In contrast to Lena’s more mobile features, Helen’s impassivity and blankness is a challenge for Bill. He has no idea how to read her and declares himself ‘frightened for the first time in my life’. According to Bill’s (flawed) logic Helen should respond to him, but she fails to react in the ways that were expected of her, or rather, she does act in a predictable way (in her love for Robin) but the consequences of her behaviour hadn’t been fully thought through. The failure to know and clearly read the woman is shown in this film to be the fault of the male scientist and his science. Whilst Helen is less overtly disruptive than either Lily in Stolen Face or even Penelope/Olga in The Perfect Woman, she is not entirely passive in the face of male control, and in her determination to kill herself she exercises sufficient agency to disrupt the male project. The similarity between Helen and Lena makes it (almost) impossible to distinguish between the two women. The laboratory fire results in the death of one of the women whilst the survivor loses her memory. Robin and Dr Harvey are wracked with uncertainty; has Lena or Helen survived? In a discussion of Frankenstein and Metropolis Ludmilla Jordonova argues that the ‘alien presence’ in the former is ‘alien because hideous’ whilst in the second, the robot Maria, is alien because she is ‘undetectable’; that is, indistinguishable from a ‘real’ woman.41 The inability here of Robin and Doc to distinguish the real woman from the artificial female created by Bill is presented as profoundly unsettling for the men and suggests the fear harboured in the male cultural imaginary towards all women. In this respect, Triangle is certainly darker than The Perfect Woman which relentlessly parades the real woman in a manner that leaves no room for ambiguity. Ultimately the film settles the matter by having the artificial woman marked by a small scar at the base of her neck. Doc has delayed examining the surviving woman because, as he suggests to Robin, ‘I thought perhaps it was your right’. The scar stands as a symbol of man’s right to assert ownership of the female body and mind, with Lena having no rights to claim her identity for herself. Whilst the film in many respects places the woman at the centre of the narrative, an equally important relationship is the one between Robin and Bill, with critics commenting on the closeness between the two men. Peter Hutchings argues that the ‘dichotomy set up by the film, with the normal Robin/Lena relationship on one side and the deviant Bill/Helen relationship on the other, is undermined by the way in which the film stresses the similarity between the men – men who are lifelong friends, both inventors, in certain respects almost interchangeable’.42 In a similar vein, Landy suggests that ‘[t]he focal point of

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the narrative is Bill’s desire to fuse with Robin. Lena is the battleground in Bill’s attempts to become like his friend, to possess what he has.’43 The literal doubling of the women Lena and Helen is extended to the two men who mirror each other in everything from their scientific interests to their rangy physiques. Whilst Hutchings argues that this ‘splitting of masculinity … registers an attempt … to deal with some anxiety relating to male identity’ he stops short of working through the full implications of this.44 The closeness between the two male friends suggests the possibility of same-sex desire and that the ‘deviancy’ that characterizes Bill and Helen’s relationship also exists between Robin and Bill, but in their case it cannot be openly expressed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on male homosociality – that is, the social bonds that exist between men – is pertinent here and she extends her definition to incorporate ‘male homosocial desire – the spectrum of male bonds that includes, but is not limited to the homosexual’.45 Whilst male homoeroticism is never as explicit in Four Sided Triangle as Phelan finds with, for example, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), it nevertheless shapes the relationship between Robin and Bill. The melodramatic plotting sets up a number of complex and interlocking (romantic) triangles: Bill loves Lena who loves Robin, Helen loves Robin who loves Lena, Doc admires Bill who loves Lena, to which we might add Bill loves Robin who loves Lena. In the first half of the film the relationship between the two men is prioritized through framing and physical placing. A recurring motif is a framing shot of Bill/Lena/Robin in a triangular structure, with Lena positioned between the two men to suggest how both love her and that she will ultimately come between them. But the fact that their relative positioning within this structure is neither equal nor balanced suggests a different meaning can emerge. Lena is positioned in the background whilst the men take up the foreground prioritizing, through physical placing, the strong connection between Bill and Robin – who occupy a different cinematic space to the one allocated to Lena. Bill, furthermore, shows remarkably little interest in Helen as an erotic object of desire. The seaside trip devised so that Helen can, in the words of Doc, ‘get used to him’ is accompanied by a montage of romantic imagery – picnics by the sea, lingering strolls in the sun – but the romance between the couple is decidedly lacklustre. Bill is more animated by the contents of his picnic sandwich than the woman in front of him, asking Helen ‘why have sandwiches no imagination in this country?’. Helen’s reply, ‘perhaps there’s a general lack of [imagination]’, shrewdly points to the failure of the male scientific project. Significantly

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the duplicated Helen wears the same wedding ring as Lena, given to her by Robin on their wedding day. Bill’s insistence, commented on by Helen as ‘strange’, that she continue to wear the ring, suggests his own desire for Robin’s love token, something that he cannot legitimately wear but can only access via Helen. Lena is more than the ‘battleground’ of Landy’s argument; she is the focal point for the expression of male homoeroticism and Bill’s desire to possess not only what Robin has, but also the man himself. The ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ couples make up a four-sided triangle, a perversion and an offence against nature, and must be destroyed to allow for normal heterosexual coupling. With the deaths of Bill and Helen all forms of ‘perversion’ are removed: out-ofcontrol science, alien women and deviant men. This film, perhaps more sharply than the others, demonstrates an uncertainty and anxiety about women and what they require from men (hence Bill’s inability to ‘read’ Helen) and a concomitant preference for male relations, played out through the theme of scientific pursuit. This male anxiety is more directly evident as the film is more overtly ‘masculinist’ in its address. It lacks the ‘balancing’ tropes of a romantic male lead, costume and music found in the other films, and its modest visual attractions are confined to the laboratory sequences and the display of male-coded technology. That the artificial woman is indistinguishable from the real is another source of unease. It is not known how the film fared at the box office although it received an unfavourable review from Picturegoer, which struggled to identify anything commercially viable in a film whose plot ‘dabbles in alchemy and romantic melodrama with equal clumsiness’.46 Certainly the casting of the American Barbara Payton as the female lead would have generated publicity. Payton had a reputation in Hollywood for sexual promiscuity, drinking and drug taking, and came to Britain in 1953 to escape negative publicity following a high-profile divorce.47 A front-page story about her (‘Payton, the Problem Girl’) appeared in Picturegoer in the September 1952 edition, foregrounding to a British public her infamous reputation. This makes her status in Triangle as an object of male desire credible, whilst it simultaneously and conversely renders ironic the idea of her as pliable and biddable love object and sheds light on male idealizations and fantasies of women as profoundly illusory and ill considered.

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Conclusion The films discussed show the attempt to realize male desire for an idealized ‘perfect’ woman through technology, but this technological achievement is then exposed as false. In all three films the artificial ‘perfect’ woman fails; a failure that seems to reinforce male impotence in terms of actualizing their desires. Indeed, as scientists they might more accurately be defined as ‘panic-stricken rather than authoritative’; a statement which suggests that anxiety concerning gender roles is a driving force for these men.48 Whilst this has become something of a gender cliché in writing about the post-war period (masculinity in both Hollywood film noir and the British war film is understood in terms of ‘anxiety’), I find it has currency in a discussion about the male scientist and his project. Do men fail to create what they really want, does technology fail them, or do they create what they think they want only to realize that they have failed to read their own desires accurately? The failure of male-made technology to function in the social world suggests that the ‘real’ woman is preferable, and in the films discussed the human woman is shown to be more than a ‘doll’. Thematically this is consistent with many other British films of this period that engage with science and demonstrate its failure or a ‘reining in’ of its wildest excesses.49 What distinguishes the treatment of science and the male scientists’ project in the alien women films is that moderation is achieved through the forces of romance and love. Emotion is the confounding variable that all science tries to exclude but it is shown in these films to be resistant to manipulation. Men, and science, disregard it at their peril and must account at all times for love. That romantic love can disrupt the male project would have been an appealing theme for a female audience and there are many elements in the films that were directly addressed to women. The slippage between male fantasy and female reality resonates with the theme, popular in Hollywood’s female gothic films of the 1940s, of women being haunted by the former wives and lovers of their husbands (Rebecca, 1940; Dragonwyck, 1946; The Two Mrs Carrolls, 1947 for example). Among other things these films demand that men give up their fantasies and pay attention to the real woman. Female audiences, well versed in these elements of women’s culture, would have found much to enjoy in the British alien women films. This is not to claim that the British films are in any way protofeminist texts (although reading against the grain may facilitate that meaning), or that they were marketed exclusively at women, rather that in their subject matter they point to an anxiety about, and uncertainty

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regarding, the post-war roles of men and women. This is treated in a broadly sympathetic manner with male scientists shown to be anxious and misguided, unthinking rather than malevolent. These films were not alone in vocalizing the theme of male control and impotence visà-vis women – the St Trinian’s cycle (1950+) most famously tackled it in the comic mode – but it is striking that it receives its most thorough working in these minor SF/comic films, often made with modest budgets and relatively modest artistic aspirations. That they enjoyed some commercial success suggests an audience appetite for cinematic depictions of male concerns and female non-compliance.

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2

The British Femme Fatale In Chapter One I discussed how the figure of the ‘man-made woman’ linked the theme of male control and impotence in relation to women with the fears about science and technology that were shaping the social consciousness. The ‘man-made woman’ was not the only fantasy figure in circulation at this time, with British cinema producing a number of films that showcased the female villain: the sexually active criminal woman, often motivated by murderous intent. These criminal women are an archetypal form of narrative trouble and permit a simultaneous celebration and demonization of the figure of the strong, active woman who refuses normative femininity and her ‘proper’ social role; themes that were replete in the British social imaginary at this time. In the Introduction I illustrated how the official prescriptions for women’s lives were contradictory; where Beveridge’s 1946 National Insurance Act positioned them as dependent housewives the 1947 Economic Survey called for them to be pulled into the workforce. Innumerable films from the post-war period framed these concerns about the conflicting position of women and their readjustment to traditional gender roles in civilian life, through the narrative trope of ‘female choice’ and a dramatic tension between desire and duty. This was as common to films within a realist mode such as It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and Dance Hall (1950) – where the heroines have love affairs which jeopardize their marriages – as it was to costume melodramas like Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944) – which literalize the theme of choice through the heroine’s split personality. Underpinning the notion of ‘choice’ was a deep-seated uncertainty about how men and women might understand and relate to one another in the new post-war world. Whilst the choice between desire and duty in both the realist and the costume melodrama modes has been well documented, what has not been addressed in critical writing is the role relative to these debates of the British femme fatale.1 This chapter will reposition the femme fatale to her proper place in British film history by arguing that a study of the murderous/duplicitous woman can shed equal light on how domestic cinema engaged with the possibilities and anxieties readily associated with female agency.

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The Absent Femme Fatale in British Cinema The commonly received wisdom is that British cinema of the 1940s failed to produce any femmes fatales. In his discussion of post-war British film Robert Murphy argues that ‘there was no equivalent to the glittering femme fatales who haunted Hollywood cinema’.2 He supports his statement with reference to Wolfenstein and Leites’ muchquoted post-war film survey that concluded ‘British films do not, on the whole, take the destructive potentialities of women seriously’.3 Likewise Sue Aspinall, who concludes her post-war survey with the claim that ‘there were few memorable images of strong women in British films’.4 Andrew Spicer, who has done much to open up the field of British noir for study by identifying its own ‘energies and distinctiveness’, is largely silent on the subject of the femme fatale, despite claims that British noir was preoccupied with ‘a critique of male prowess, potency, sexuality and criminality’; concerns where we might reasonably expect to find a female influence.5 How do we explain this curious critical absence, given that the British crime film in all its various manifestations proliferated in the post-war period? Sue Harper’s ground-breaking work on Gainsborough costume drama has convincingly demonstrated the centrality of ‘wicked ladies’ in British cinema, and she argues that the post-war period ‘is notable for the amount of screen time given to female villainy, and the care taken to discriminate between its different types and degrees … [as] female deviants quickly spread from costume to modern melodrama and to other generic forms.’6 From this statement we might reasonably conclude that the dangerous female was present across a range of genres including – but not limited to – crime. This chapter will draw together the two strands of the crime film and the female villain into a discussion of the femme fatale as she emerges, contrary to previous opinion, within a specifically post-war British film context. As Britain struggled with war-time rationing and a burgeoning blackmarket economy a new type of crime film emerged in British cinema which Peter Wollen and others have categorized as the ‘Spiv cycle’.7 Films such as Waterloo Road (1945), They Made Me a Fugitive (1947) and Brighton Rock (1948) focused on a criminal underworld populated by razor gangs, delinquents and ‘wide-boys’, dealing in black-market goods within the urban milieu of the palais de dance, the boxing ring and the dog track. Within these worlds men dominate and women are secondary, being either loyal but duped wives and girlfriends or

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dance hostesses and nightclub performers who function primarily as objects of male exchange. In either role their narrative importance is minimal and their concerns and desires marginal. These films, popular with audiences, attracted a mixed critical response. While some responded positively to the perceived energy, vitality and realism of the films, others condemned them for their ‘sordidness’ and glamorization of crime. The Sight and Sound critic Arthur Vesselo coined the term ‘morbid burrowings’ in 1947 to describe contemporary British filmmaking which had an ‘unpleasant undertone, a parade of frustrated violence, an inversion and disordering of moral values, a groping into the grimier recesses of the mind.’8 Vesselo’s term, although originally applied to They Made Me A Fugitive, has been taken up by critics such as Robert Murphy to describe the wider cycle of film-making in post-war Britain that dramatized themes of paranoia, male anxiety, murder, psychological disturbance, sex and violence.9 The parallels with American film noir are obvious, and from 1943–49 Britain produced its own cycle of ‘morbid films’ concerned with maladjusted or brain-damaged veterans (The October Man, 1947; The Small Back Room, 1948), hommes fatales (Blanche Fury, 1947) and tragic male murderers (Daybreak, 1946; Dear Murderer, 1947; Obsession, 1949). What Murphy rightly identifies about this loose cycle of film-making is its diffuseness with male paranoia and criminality appearing across a broad spectrum of films which, in Spicer’s topography, ranges from topical crime thrillers to gothic-inspired Victorian films noirs.10 Indeed it is this very diffuseness that has mitigated against a serious engagement with the British femme fatale. Dangerous women are central to some contemporary crime dramas (Dear Murderer) but more marginal to others (Obsession). They are afforded little narrative space in the ‘Spiv cycle’ but assume greater prominence in gothic noir (for example So Evil My Love, 1948; Daughter of Darkness, 1948; Madeleine, 1949).11 This diffuseness is only part of the explanation. British film criticism has demonstrated a remarkable uncomfortableness with home-grown female villainy and has struggled to find a way to engage with it in any meaningful manner. The most popular British star of the 1940s, Margaret Lockwood, was the quintessential ‘wicked lady’ of British cinema (see her murderous roles in costume dramas such as The Man in Grey, 1943 and The Wicked Lady, 1945), but critics of the day roundly dismissed her performances. Leonard Mosley in the Daily Express declared ‘I just cannot believe in Miss Margaret Lockwood as a femme fatale’, and the Guardian likened her to ‘cold suet pudding’, whilst for

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Time and Tide she was competent to ‘launch a hair style [rather] than a thousand ships’.12 As I discuss in Chapter Six, Lockwood’s wicked lady roles were poorly served by the film review pages of Woman magazine, with the critic Freda Bruce Lockhart commenting that Lockwood ‘doesn’t even look naughty’.13 Gavin Lambert later sneeringly dismissed her performances as ‘suburban’ and indeed she has fared no better with more recent commentators.14 For Murphy, Lockwood’s costume roles are examples of ‘boisterous, good-natured villainesses, bold but unthreatening’, whilst her role as a ‘real femme fatale’ in Bedelia (d. Lance Comfort 1946, adapted for the screen by Vera Caspary, from her novel of the same name) sees her performing as a ‘spoilt child rather than a psychopath’ with the film compared unfavourably to Caspary/ Preminger’s Laura (1944).15 The sense that Lockwood cannot be taken seriously as a femme fatale even now suggests that the benchmark for dangerous women remains predicated on a Hollywood model perhaps best embodied by Barbara Stanwyck, whose femininity was resolutely modern, edgy and urban. The Angel-in-the-House This, however, elides any engagement with how a specifically British variant of the femme fatale may have emerged, and there are two key concerns that need to be addressed: domesticity and sexuality. As Babington has demonstrated, part of Lockwood’s appeal was her ordinariness coupled with elements of the exotic which he terms the ‘Karachi-Norwood interface’.16 Her star persona embodied a type of fatal femininity which was inflected through a domestic lens, seemingly at odds with commonplace understandings of the ‘Hollywood femme fatale’ but rooted in a specifically British context and threatening because of its very domesticity. The ordinary/exotic dualism of Lockwood’s star persona is actualized in Bedelia where her titular heroine is a serial killer who marries then poisons her husbands to inherit the insurance money. A prestige production and star vehicle for Lockwood, this glossy melodrama was clearly addressed at female audiences with publicity materials focusing on Lockwood’s hairstyles, jewellery and wardrobe, which had been designed by Elizabeth Haffenden.17 Beautifully dressed and with a penchant for exotic items such as Siamese cats (hardly indigenous to the film’s Yorkshire setting) Bedelia is also presented as the ‘perfect wife’: charming, biddable, and skilled at housekeeping. On the one hand Bedelia functions as an

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inverted angel-in-the-house figure with her characterization indicating, as Marcia Landy has suggested, that the ‘overtly domestic female is the disrupter of family and tradition’ and with the film warning of ‘the dangers of excessive femininity’.18 However, Bedelia’s characterization is rather more complex than this reading allows. Under interrogation by her husband and an insurance investigator, Bedelia responds with a violent outburst: ‘I hate men, they’re rotten beasts, I wish all the men in the world were dead.’ This statement is a moment of emotional truth from the normally evasive Bedelia and hints at an unexplained trauma in her life. Her actions seem motivated less by financial greed (she rarely spends her money) than to visit vengeance on men for a great wrong done to her. In this film the femme fatale is embodied in the character of the ‘ordinary’ women being simultaneously a figure of vengeance and the perfect wife, whilst her central position in the domestic sphere indicates a certain anxiety about what this role might require of women. This focus on the domestic extends beyond Lockwood, as the spectre of the poisoning wife proliferated in post-war British cinema not only in gothic noir (Pink String and Sealing Wax, 1945; So Evil My Love, 1948; Madeleine, 1949) but also in contemporary thrillers such as Dear Murderer. Poisoning has long occupied a central place in the popular consciousness as a quintessentially female method of murder and the gendered weapon of choice for women who enjoy unregulated access to the vulnerable stomachs of the family.19 The spectre of the ‘poisoning wife’ is one that emerges historically and alongside studies of female criminality which, as Jones has argued, have proliferated at times of ‘profound unease about women’s place in society’.20 It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the poisoning wife emerges in the post-war period, but as a more domestic variant of the femme fatale, this figure has been relatively overlooked in studies of British cinema. Whilst the idea of domestic space as threatening is a long-standing feature of the female gothic film, in the Hollywood variant men threaten women in this sphere (The Spiral Staircase, 1946; Secret Beyond the Door, 1947). Conversely, in the British films mentioned above it is the women who prove deadly to the men, and the dominant setting for crime, and by association ‘transgressive’ femininity, is the domestic realm rather than a criminal underworld, with murder carried out through the use of domestic weapons such as poison and sleeping tablets rather than guns.

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Peculiarly British Sexuality As Rebecca Stott and others have argued, sexuality is the defining feature of the femme fatale; a sexuality that is ‘perceived to be rapacious, or fatal to her male partners’.21 It is this component more than any other which is seen as lacking in British actresses and which might account for Murphy’s comment that Lockwood is ‘unthreatening’ in the role of villain. Sue Aspinall’s claim that female characters were rarely involved in ‘the exercise of female power through sexuality’ is fairly representative of British critical commentary on this subject.22 Certainly British cinema had always used ‘exotic outsiders’ to import sexual sophistication into the narrative.23 During the war and immediate post-war period, casting ‘exotics’ was neither possible nor desirable and home-grown actresses were called upon to perform divergent femininity with varying degrees of critical success. Actresses as diverse as Googie Withers (Pink String and Sealing Wax; Night and the City, 1950), Margaret Lockwood (Bedelia), Jean Kent (Good Time Girl, 1948), Ann Todd (Daybreak; So Evil My Love; Madeleine), Greta Gynt (Dear Murderer; Easy Money, 1948), Patricia Roc (The Brothers, 1947) and Siobhan McKenna (Daughter of Darkness) featured as villains in period and contemporary melodramas and crime thrillers, made by a range of British production companies including Ealing, Gainsborough and Cineguild. An actress’s star persona inflected the female villain character in particular ways. Ann Todd’s impassive glacial iciness differed markedly from Googie Withers’ sensual and grounded persona, producing a broad spectrum of fatal femininity where sexuality was not necessarily rapacious in the way that Stott deploys the term. For example, Ann Todd was, as Harper suggests, adept at ‘inspir[ing] passion in others … [whilst herself remaining] frigid’.24 The idea of a frigid femme fatale is perhaps a peculiarly British phenomenon. There is no doubt that Todd’s characters are fatal to men: in Madeleine she poisons a besotted and blackmailing former lover whilst in Daybreak the rivalry between her two suitors causes murder and suicide. Similarly Withers (another duplicitous poisoner), whose sexuality was shot through with a degree of pragmatism that enabled her to approach her male victims with steely determination.25 Frigidity and pragmatism may seem the antithesis of the femme fatale but they point to a particularly British inflection of female sexuality and indicate some of the methodological limitations in deploying wholesale, to any national cinema, a framework drawn from critical discussions of the Hollywood femme fatale. Within the space available

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in this chapter I want to offer a case study of three types of British femme fatale appearing in films ranging from contemporary thrillers to gothic and Victorian melodramas: the mature overtly sexual woman who self-consciously performs female villainy (Greta Gynt in Dear Murderer and Easy Money), the seemingly repressed femme fatale (Ann Todd in Madeleine and Daybreak) and the more domestic yet no less deadly ingénue type located within a rural setting (Siobhan McKenna in Daughter of Darkness). The three types illustrate some of the diverse ways in which British cinema imagined femininity and female sexuality in the post-war years. At times I’ve drawn from existing scholarship on the femme fatale (particularly Doane, Gledhill, Dyer),26 and these ideas have helped illuminate readings, but I have borne in mind the Britishness of these femmes, and suggested points where they depart from these critical frameworks. Performing Fatal Femininity for the British Screen – Greta Gynt Greta Gynt enthusiastically embraced stardom within British cinema at a time when many British actresses eschewed such glamour in favour of a more modest star identity.27 Norwegian-born, she trained as an actor and dancer and came to England in 1935, aged 19. Instructed by her agent to model herself on Madeleine Carroll, she dyed her hair blonde and after an apprenticeship in supporting roles she secured a seven-year contract with Rank, enjoying a brief but intense period of success from 1943–48. She provided fuel for the gossip columns with numerous marriages and love affairs and was a shameless self-promoter who always courted press attention. She famously appeared at a 1947 Royal Command performance in a silver lamé dress, matching silver fox coat and silver hair adorned with silver osprey feathers in a calculated attempt to steal publicity from Hollywood star Loretta Young, whose film The Bishop’s Wife was premiering at the event.28 She later commented that she looked ‘like a fairy on the Christmas tree gone wrong – but of course it made all the papers next day’.29 Described in 1948 by society magazine The Leader as ‘the only Rank star who behaves like a film star’, she has subsequently passed into the annuals of British film history as a vamp – one obituary describing her as ‘the slinkiest Delilah of them all’.30 Equally at home in comedy or straight drama, it was her roles in Dear Murderer and Easy Money that consolidated her female villain status. Upon her retirement from film

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production at the end of the 1950s she declared herself ‘utterly bored with this femme fatale business’.31 Gynt’s Nordic heritage gave her an outsider status which meant she could signify as the ‘exotic other’ to the British cultural consciousness and perform certain roles in British cinema, whilst Norway’s position as occupied ally during the war ensured she continued to readily find work in the British film industry. It was of course her exotic outsider status coupled with her ‘Hollywood-esque’ attributes that allowed her to be read as a convincing femme fatale, both at the time and subsequently. Reviewing Dear Murderer for Sight and Sound in 1947, Arthur Vesselo argued that the film’s ‘chief redeeming feature’ was Gynt as a ‘highly unscrupulous siren’.32 She is afforded a brief mention in Murphy and Spicer’s studies of British noir; Murphy approvingly describing her as ‘glitteringly evil’ in Dear Murderer whilst for Spicer she succeeds as ‘the most ruthless femme fatale in British cinema’.33 For these two commentators there remains a sense that Gynt is best understood as an anomaly within British cinema, but what is missing from this account is an understanding of Gynt that locates her more precisely within a spectrum of British fatal femininity. Whilst aspects of Gynt’s star persona clearly did enable her to function effectively as a femme fatale, conversely those same elements could work against the character-type. Within British cinema culture where, as Babington rightly suggests, an ‘anti-star inflection of stardom’ predominated, Gynt occupied the terrain of self-conscious performer.34 Her own reference to the business of performing as a femme fatale suggests a self-awareness of her image, its construction and presentation. She was regularly cast in roles that showcased performances: a nightclub singer and dancer in The Common Touch (1941) and Easy Money, an opera singer in Take My Life (1947), and a cabaret artiste in Crooks’ Tour (1941). This, coupled with her training as a dancer, meant that her star persona included a generic ‘song and dance’ or ‘performative’ element. Christine Gledhill notes that the placing of noir women in ‘image-producing roles – nightclub singers, hostesses, models etc. … [has meant that] their performance of the roles accorded them in this form of male story-telling foregrounds the fact of their image as an artifice’.35 With Gynt, the idea of artifice is heightened, and her star persona worked in interesting ways with the film material. She is simultaneously convincing as the dangerous woman, whilst pointing to the creation of that image and its construction as a fantasy figure.

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Easy Money This tension is evident in Easy Money (d. Bernard Knowles 1948), a portmanteau film which warns against the dangers of gambling and, by association, loose women. Gynt is cast as nightclub singer Pat Parsons, who persuades her pools-clerk boyfriend Joe to make a false claim on the pools for a payout of £20,000. Interrogated by the company’s claims investigator, Pat tries to double-cross Joe and the sequence ends with their arrest. Made with a modest budget by producer Sydney Box for Gainsborough, and co-scripted by Muriel Box, Easy Money was one of Box’s ‘topicals’ which were films loosely intended as a commentary on various aspects of contemporary life, in this case gambling.36 Opening in typical noir fashion, with flashback and moralizing voiceover, Gynt’s character is introduced performing her regular nightclub routine. Dressed in a black satin split-skirt dress and gloves she performs the song ‘Shady Lady Spiv’ to an upmarket nightclub audience seated at tables through which she moves and dances whilst singing.37 The scene is a remake of Rita Hayworth’s strip-tease performance of ‘Put the Blame on Mame’ in Gilda (1946). Gynt’s dress, described by a commentator at the time as the ‘new look and look again’ gown,38 is virtually a direct copy of Hayworth’s outfit. Wearing 24-button gloves to above the elbow, and with her shoulder-length hair blonde and waved, Gynt copies the hair-tossing mannerisms of Hayworth in Gilda in a manner that leaves no room for ambiguity in recognizing the source of the scene. Certainly performing a British variant of Gilda, an instantly recognizable femme fatale, is a role that no British actress other than Gynt could realistically and convincingly have attempted at this time, and the scene is intended to showcase Gynt’s character as a sex object for male heterosexual pleasure and the cause of their downfall, whilst it simultaneously celebrates her glamorous femininity. However, the notion of image-production cannot be escaped; artifice is foregrounded from the outset and runs throughout the film. In part this is achieved because of the double performance taking place as the star ‘Greta Gynt’ performs ‘Rita Hayworth’s Gilda’, which results in the audience being positioned to read between the two scenes. As Andrew Horton has illustrated in his work on remakes (an elastic term which can encompass allusion, parody or the recreation of key scenes), these ‘invite and at times demand that the viewer participate in both looking at and reading between multiple texts’.39 Richard Dyer has demonstrated convincingly that Gilda is a problematic femme fatale, not least because Hayworth’s

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5. Greta Gynt as the ‘Shady Lady Spiv’ in Easy Money (1948)

star persona (her ‘charisma’) resists some of the negative connotations of the deadly female.40 Given the striking and extended parallelism between the two films, traces of this resistance spill over into Easy Money. Gynt’s song ‘Shady Lady Spiv’ suggests female culpability in the post-war black-market economy (singing, ‘ladies cash-in looks aren’t done on coupon ration books’), and that women sell sexual favours to the highest bidder (‘she’ll be your lady, but you’ve got to give-givegive’). But drawing together the myriad intertextual and contextual circuits of allusion and parallelism, it’s evident that performance and resistance are at play here and bring challenges to bear on this version of sexual politics. The film’s moralizing discourse is consistent with the idea of the film as a ‘social commentary’ and is not over-turned (it authoritatively proclaims Pat at the point of her arrest ‘a wicked and foolish girl’) but it is certainly disrupted and its validity rendered ambiguous; a characteristic that is not atypical of the femme fatale figure and her narrative positioning. Through Gynt and her performance of Gilda the film becomes a multi-layered text, positioned to readily address a post-war audience’s appetite for alternative meanings.

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Dear Murderer A similar pattern obtains in Dear Murderer (d. Arthur Crabtree 1947) which, even more than Easy Money, points to the femme as a male fantasy figure. In this film Gynt’s character, Vivien Warren, is a society woman who drives her husband Lee (Eric Portman) to distraction with her constant infidelities. Lee returns from a business trip in America to murder one of her lovers, Richard, and then frames a second paramour, Jimmy, for Richard’s murder. A police investigation ensues and Lee is wracked with guilt at the incarceration of the innocent Jimmy. The film concludes with Vivien murdering Lee with an overdose of sleeping tablets (administered via a hot milk drink, under the guise of the ‘caring wife’) and being arrested by the police. A psychological crime thriller with an upper middle-class contemporary setting, the film thematically and stylistically deploys characteristics we now typically associate with film noir. Adapted from a play, the film is studio-bound, with the drama located in interior domestic settings and much of the action taking place at night. Chiaroscuro lighting is used to enhance this moody and claustrophobic setting. The iconography of Janey Place’s ‘spider woman’ is in evidence for Gynt’s character.41 Her long hair frames her face, she smokes constantly, and wears a number of glamorous outfits that signal her sexual availability. She frequently gazes at herself in the mirror at times of narrative importance (reflecting on her infidelity or planning her husband’s murder) suggesting the ‘selfabsorbed narcissism’ of the femme and the desire for autonomy.42 She is introduced through her husband’s flashback, and Lee’s voice-over draws attention to her appearance: ‘I remember how she looked, she was wearing her new black dress’. The simultaneous introduction of Vivien through physical appearance and Lee’s voice-over description of her denies her the opportunity to represent herself. She readily uses her sexuality to exercise power over men, using sex and emotional blackmail to achieve her goals. For example, after convincing Lee that she really loves him she later persuades him to write an ambiguously worded note that she uses to fake his murder as a suicide. Her presentation as confident, aggressive and sexually promiscuous suggests that on one level she unambiguously occupies the space of the dangerous woman in the narrative and her arrest is to be understood as justifiable punishment for her hubris. This, however, is not the only role attributed to her. The film is usually approached critically as one of a number of post-war psychological thrillers where the travails of ‘sensitive and tormented’ middle-class

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men are foregrounded.43 The film’s press book, however, places great emphasis on Gynt as ‘a perfect model’, with film studios being well positioned to take advantage of the actress’s ‘enviable ability as a fashion model’.44 A full-page spread details aspects of Gynt’s ‘£2,000 wardrobe’ for the film: the ‘white strapless evening dress with draped crepe bodice and a skirt of cascades of white tulle’, the ‘exquisite hand beaten bronze and pearl studded flower jewellery’, the ‘sable-trimmed hat and muff’ and the ‘£3,000 luxurious mink coat’ on loan from a ‘distinguished London fashion house’. With accompanying film stills of Gynt in a variety of outfits, suggestions are then put forward as to how female viewers (the ‘average woman’) can adapt these ideas, which ‘can be copied quite easily and cheaply’, for their own wardrobes. The film’s publicity material then suggests the central importance of ‘performing’ and the film is a vehicle for Gynt to showcase a number of outfits that celebrate a glamorous femininity. These range from smart, stylish daywear to glamorous evening gowns, paraded against a backdrop of elegant dining and sophisticated ‘contemporary’ living. The film’s wardrobe was designed by Yvonne Caffin, who had worked as Elizabeth Haffenden’s assistant at Gainsborough during the war. Haffenden, who worked in a non-realist mode, was skilled at creating a ‘costume narrative’ that gave subconscious ‘cues’ about characters.45 Although Caffin worked in a realist mode and was therefore more conventional than her mentor, she was nevertheless adept at enhancing or signalling a character through nuance and detail in the costume. During one scene, for example, when Lee confronts Vivien about her adultery Gynt’s outfit, with pleated draped sleeves and adorned at the shoulder with decorative curlicues, not only signals her overt femininity but gives it a decidedly reptilian hue. The film’s visual pleasure, both now and certainly for a post-war austerity audience, derives as much from Gynt’s numerous costume changes as it does from her performance as ‘glitteringly evil’ or from Reginald’s Wyer’s ‘accomplished noir cinematography’.46 It is the frequent costume changes (which take place from scene to scene) coupled with Gynt’s star persona that provide the film with its sense of ‘dressing-up’ and playing multiple roles; both the stylish society wife and the fatal woman. The notion of image production in relation to the fatal/duplicitous woman is also evident in other, perhaps less immediately obvious, ways. The film opens with an extended scene depicting the husband, Lee, entering a stylish apartment and rifling through bedroom wardrobes and drawers. His attention is arrested by flowers in the waste-paper bin which are accompanied by a card reading, ‘Love Always, Richard’.

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Spurred on by this ‘clue’, Lee continues searching for more evidence of his wife’s infidelity, and quickly finds numerous cards in the dressingtable drawer, all bearing the same message and intended to indicate the woman’s unbounded capacity for sexual duplicity. Vivien as an embodied character is entirely absent in the opening sequence and is only introduced twenty minutes into the film. What is present and so motivates the action is the idea of the duplicitous woman. Lee’s image of the ‘unfaithful wife’, a resident wartime folk-devil, is here pressed into service as a structuring absence. In this respect the idea of the femme fatale that is deployed in this scene recalls Angela Martin’s observation that this is an image that expresses ‘a masculine view of female sexuality’ and one which Martin argues, drawing on Mary Ann Doane, functions ‘as a kind of signpost’.47 For Martin, this signpost can point to male neurosis: that is, ‘women in films noirs are … subjected to male definition … not because they are a threat but because the male characters … project a neurotic sense of threat on everyone and everything around them’.48 Martin’s observation bears on Dear Murderer where the opening sequence illustrating the wife’s infidelity equally points to the obsessive nature of Richard’s ‘love’ (a man who clearly exhibits no restraint) and the husband’s capacity for paranoia and mental instability. That the husband might be the subject of query and investigation is hinted at in the film’s publicity material. The husband Lee is a typical example of the neurotic and damaged characters that the actor Eric Portman specialized in playing in the postwar years. A key item in the film’s press book is an article entitled ‘Do you really know Eric Portman?’ which, after giving brief biographical details, invites audiences to consider the actor in roles different to his usual ‘suave, sinister style’. As a typical piece of promotion and star study the article is not unusual, but it does succeed in foregrounding the man rather than the woman as the troubling enigma that the film might then work to resolve. There has been a critical tendency to approach Greta Gynt as the archetypal ‘siren’ or ‘ruthless femme’ and to read her as imagistic shorthand for fatal femininity on the British screen. This approach fails to engage fully with her position within British cinema and how aspects of her particular star persona (performativity, image-construction) pull against the femme fatale type in various, complex ways that suggest different readings. In Dear Murderer she is simultaneously the dangerous woman and a figure of male fantasy, and the perfect fashion model addressed at a female audience. Actresses more readily positioned within a domestic framework performed different versions

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of fatal femininity although, in common with Gynt, these were not without contradictions. It is to these different versions of ‘female fatalness’ that I will now turn. The ‘Repressed’ Femme Fatale in Daybreak and Madeleine In marked contrast to Greta Gynt’s status as exotic outsider (albeit one comfortably positioned within British cinema) the actress Ann Todd was very much an insider figure. British born and trained, she entered film-making in the 1930s and, after a protracted apprenticeship in supporting film (and stage) roles, her breakthrough came in the internationally successful The Seventh Veil (1945). Her 1949 marriage to the film director David Lean consolidated her insider status and the couple made three films together before separating in 1954 (The Passionate Friends, Madeleine and The Sound Barrier). Her later comments on the status of the star – describing it as ‘a label I can’t stand’ – position her within the ‘anti-star inflection of stardom’ that has so dominated British cinema.49 With her trademark white-blonde hair, sharply defined cheekbones and ‘restrained’ performance style, she was typically described (both at the time and subsequently) as icy, ethereal, witch-like, inscrutable and enigmatic.50 It is Todd’s emotional coldness that Harper reads as ‘frigid’, although at its most effective her style hinted at the repression of deep emotions residing beneath the surface. McFarlane’s observation that Todd was able to deploy ‘conflicting suggestions of propriety and sensuality’ most accurately characterizes her as a performer.51 It is a style which seems ill-suited to the role of the femme fatale, where sexuality is more readily portrayed as overtly aggressive and sultry, but in fact it is particularly well suited to a dominant type of British cinema predicated on a tension between restraint and excess.52 Daybreak In Daybreak (d. Compton Bennett 1946) Todd plays Frankie, a nightclub dancer whose experiences with men have left her embittered and cynical. Uprooted and drifting, she meets middle-aged Eddie Tribe (Eric Portman) who has recently inherited a small fleet of barges at Gravesend. The couple strike up a seemingly unlikely alliance and appear content for a while, but Eddie’s secret life as a public hangman,

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which he keeps hidden from Frankie, eventually threatens their happiness. Eddie gives work to the handsome Olaf (Maxwell Reed) and against her better judgement Frankie is increasingly drawn to the man. The couple become lovers and their eventual discovery by Eddie causes the ménage à trois to implode. Frankie commits suicide, Eddie exacts revenge on Olaf by wrongly imprisoning him for murder, and Eddie, grief-stricken at Frankie’s death, eventually hangs himself.53 A sense of fatalism infects the film. Eddie inherits more than just the barge business from his father. The man was an adulterous husband to Eddie’s mother, a beautiful and sensitive woman whose life was ruined by her husband’s cruelty. Eddie likewise suffered brutality and bullying at his father’s hands. The legacy is thus one of psychological and emotional suffering. Indeed in Frankie’s early comment to Eddie – ‘You don’t know much about women do you?’ – is a recognition of Eddie’s failure to develop emotionally. Eddie’s lack of experience with women contrasts sharply with Frankie’s extensive experience with men, which has left her bitter and cynical (‘most men aren’t kind’, she proclaims). The couple’s shared liking of animals is indicative of how both have almost given up on people. Despite their tentative attempts at happiness, outside events always threaten to overtake them. Whilst Olaf ’s predatory sexuality casts an obvious shadow over them, Eddie’s job as public hangman ensures that death hangs (literally) over their lives. Scenes of Frankie and Eddie’s domestic life are interspersed with scenes of Eddie noting execution dates in his secret diary and then travelling across the country to perform them. Eddie’s hidden double life is thus a constant threat to the present. The setting is likewise used to effectively enhance the sense that the life the couple create for themselves is not sustainable. By choosing to turn one of the barges into a houseboat (filmed in a studio setting and surrounded by atmospheric fog) the couple are positioned in a liminal space, cut loose from social connections.54 They have no telephone and connection for Frankie with the outside world is primarily via Bill, an elderly and drunken sailor who periodically rows her to the shore for shopping. Whilst initially this space offers both characters the chance of positive renewal, it is ultimately experienced negatively. When Olaf boards the boat in Eddie’s absence Frankie cannot escape and her earlier statement to Eddie that ‘You can’t live on a barge!’ is proven correct by the unfolding of tragic events. Frankie’s status as a femme fatale is complex and at times contradictory. She clearly exhibits a sexuality that attracts men to her and they die because of it. Whilst never a sexual aggressor, she is evidently

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sexually experienced and immediately recognizes the danger that Olaf presents. She tries to persuade Eddie to dismiss Olaf in an attempt to preserve their domestic happiness, but the attraction that Olaf and Frankie hold for each other is made clear. She disparagingly refers to Olaf as ‘like an American film star’, but their shared love of dancing is her weakness. She lies to Eddie, absent on one of his ‘business’ trips, and goes dancing with Olaf at the palais de dance; a place where sexual desire can readily be given expression. Frankie oscillates throughout between desire and repression of that desire, and Todd convincingly portrays the sense of struggle between the two. In one scene Olaf leaves a dance record on the barge to be discovered by Frankie. She plays the tune and dances whilst, unbeknown to her, he watches. She’s momentarily startled when she discovers his presence but his quick flattery of her dancing pleases her. His comment of ‘we should dance … you, you have it’ elicits an emotional outburst of ‘I did once!’ and she stands very close to him, her face (captured in close-up) looking up, smiling, then breathing heavily. Almost immediately she recognizes that she has let herself go too far and turns abruptly away, reining in her sexual desire and emotional excess. Re-appropriating the persona of the ‘responsible wife’ and feigning sexual disinterest she reproaches Olaf with a curt ‘have you fixed the window?’ in an attempt to return their interaction to legitimate domestic matters. A similar tension is evident in a later scene where Frankie continues to fluctuate between attraction and disapproval of Olaf. Frankie is neither a passive victim of sexual manipulation nor a sexual aggressor and she is reminiscent of what James Maxfield terms the ‘fatal woman’ who is fatal to the hero but in herself neither evil nor a ‘deliberate agent of the hero’s destruction’.55 Whilst Ann Todd’s Frankie does not exhibit the aggressive sexuality characteristic of Greta Gynt’s performance of fatal femininity, neither is she devoid of sexual expression. As a type of femme fatale the characterization of Frankie is noteworthy because Todd captures in her performance something of the struggle between moral responsibility and personal desire. Madeleine The tension between convention and freedom also characterizes Todd’s later film, Madeleine. In this female-centred drama set in nineteenthcentury Glasgow, Todd plays the titular heroine Madeleine, the eldest daughter of an upper-class family who, like all heroines, must negotiate

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the problems that arise from being a woman.56 Madeleine is conducting an affair with a lower-class man, Emile – a dandified French clerk in her father’s business whom she knows her father will never accept as a legitimate suitor. Under increasing pressure from her father to accept Mr Minnoch, his choice of husband for her, Madeleine breaks with Emile who resorts to blackmail by threatening to reveal her love letters to her father. Emile then dies suddenly and in suspicious circumstances, and Madeleine is accused of poisoning. She stands trial and a verdict of ‘not proven’ (only available in Scottish law) is returned. The film closes on Madeleine’s enigmatic smile and the question of her guilt, or innocence, is never resolved.57 Deliberate ambiguity is at the heart of the narrative, and the films’ opening voice-over (an anonymous male narrator) introduces Madeleine’s ‘strange romantic story’ and positions this ‘unusual’ young women as the object to be held up for scrutiny and examination. Madeleine thus operates within the model of the femme fatale proposed by Doane whereby ‘the threat of the woman [is transformed] into a secret, something which must be aggressively revealed, unmasked, discovered’.58 From the outset the domestic setting of the bourgeois Victorian home is presented as oppressive. Madeleine, her two younger sisters and her mother are bullied mercilessly by a cruel father, a tyrannical patriarch who presides over the family home. The family moves into a new house and Madeleine is irresistibly drawn to the basement room which she intends to occupy as a bedroom declaring, ‘I like this room very much’. The room provides her with a degree of freedom as its basement location and proximity to the servant’s entrance allows her to conduct secret trysts with her lover Emile. The setting is replete with sexual imagery; Madeleine takes a hidden key from the drawer and passes it to Emile through the bars of the window; Emile later thrusts a phallic cane through the same window when Madeleine refuses him entry. The spatial arrangement within the house points to desire and its repression which lies, hidden, beneath the respectable façade of the Victorian drawing room. The Victorian setting also harmonizes with the ambiguity that is characteristic of Todd; the ready display of an ‘icy’ façade and emotional coldness, coupled with the suggestion of sensuality and emotional depth. These two polarities are readily played out as Todd’s character expresses both sexual desire and sexual reticence, although in the case of the latter there is an acute awareness of coyness as an accepted sexual stereotype for women. Whilst never a sexual aggressor, it is clear that Madeleine is sexually desiring and finds a ready outlet for that desire in the form of Emile. The

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archetypal ‘rake’ Emile is in many respects the imaginative manifestation of her repressed desires; a Byronic hero conjured up from the pages of popular literature, who appears at night to the accompaniment of thunder storms and whose ‘foreignness’ ensures his status as a social transgressor. Their basement trysts culminate in a secret rendezvous at the family’s holiday home where they meet on a hilltop overlooking a moonlit sea, accompanied by the musical strains of a working-class wedding party taking place in the valley below. Madeleine commands Emile to dance with her and as the music intensifies (augmented by some rapid cross-cutting) she grasps Emile’s cane and discards it before the couple fall to the floor in a passionate embrace. Her appropriation of the phallus and her sensuality, signified here by her diaphanous swirling white gown and loose, flowing hair, clearly suggests an active sexuality that dares to transgress socio-sexual norms. Furthermore, Madeleine, in contradiction with Sue Aspinall’s statement, does exercise female power through the deployment of her sexuality. Madeleine breaks with Emile when she realizes that his greatest desire is for social mobility and his response to this is blackmail; he will send her love letters to her father. Madeleine must now convince Emile that she does want to marry him on his terms, and in a manner similar to Gynt’s character in Dear Murderer her strategy is to feign sexual [re] interest in him. Crucially the love scene differs from that on the hillside where Madeleine was the instigator. Madeleine reluctantly receives Emile into the basement kitchen of the family home and terminates his confrontation of her by falling to the ground weeping. At Emile’s touch her face reveals a blank, inscrutable expression and, without resistance, she allows him to gather up her limp body in a passionate embrace. By allowing Emile to dominate her at this crucial point (and indeed knowing that an arrogant Emile will be inclined to read her neutral expression as passive acquiescence) Madeleine gives him the illusion of power and in doing so wins a reprieve from confronting her father. Through the disguise of the ‘acquiescent female’ she manipulates norms of femininity and is able to exercise agency within the limits in which she is forced to operate. This theme is made further evident in her dealings with Mr Minnoch, her father’s preferred suitor for her. When Minnoch presses her for an answer to his marriage proposal, Madeleine exploits the accepted sexual stereotype of demure feminine reserve in response and succeeds in delaying a final decision about the marriage. Her acute awareness of femininity as masquerade – the expectation that she will perform

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a femininity deemed ‘natural’ for a woman of her social standing – is evidenced in a later scene where her father questions her about the failure of Mr Minnoch to propose: Madeleine: I can hardly propose to him myself Papa. Papa: No, but I cannot help feeling that some sign, some indication from you would … Madeleine: Bring him to the boil Papa?

Madeleine’s quip is insightful and incurs her father’s wrath because she dares to both vocalize his thoughts and the reality of socially sanctioned female role-playing. Throughout she is proven to be a skilled manipulator of sexual stereotypes and it is through her performance of the dutiful hostess, biddable and attentive to Emile’s needs, that the spectre of the poisoning wife is ushered into the family home and she serves Emile cocoa (possibly) laced with poison. Likewise the pharmacist, confronted with what he reads as a beautiful and vain young woman, readily accepts Madeleine’s excuse that she needs arsenic as a beauty preparation. Whilst not cast in an image-producing role, the characterization of the heroine nevertheless foregrounds the notions of artifice, masquerade and disguise in relation to femininity, and also how women struggle for agency within feminine roles which readily serve the interests of patriarchal society. Todd’s characters in both films exhibit a type of fatal femininity where active sexuality can surface alongside sexual repression, and in this respect the tension between social convention and female agency is laid bare. Madeleine’s period setting and status as a gothic noir gives it greater licence to explore sexual and social transgressions and issues of class and social propriety. Similar themes are evident in Daughter of Darkness (1948, adapted from a 1938 play), although here the tension is between the exotic and the domestic, embodied in the figure of the young lowerclass woman. The ‘Domestic-Exotic’ – Daughter of Darkness Daughter of Darkness (d. Lance Comfort) is a full-blooded melodrama in gothic mode with the central protagonist, a young Irish servant girl, Emmy Baudine (played by Irish actress Siobhan McKenna), using her sexuality to lure young men to their deaths.59 Banished from her village in Ireland, she is dispatched to a Yorkshire farm headed by

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Bess Stanforth (Anne Crawford) and her husband. Young unmarried men from the local community begin to mysteriously disappear (their mutilated bodies later discovered) and Bess, increasingly suspicious of Emmy, confronts her, eventually expelling Emmy from the community to meet her death. The narrative is thus structured by the investigation of a mystery, although in common with many films noirs the focus of the investigation is displaced onto the woman and what follows is an investigation of female sexuality and its disruptive effects. Of particular interest is how nationality and landscape are used to construct fatal femininity, the nature of Emmy’s sexual power and the role of the woman Bess in investigating and regulating female sexuality. In contrast with the urban milieu most typically associated with noir, Daughter deploys a specifically rural landscape as the backdrop for its investigation of female sexuality. In the original play Emmy’s origins were Cornish, but in the film her roots are in rural Ireland; a shift that is significant. As Ruth Barton has argued, Irish neutrality during the war severely fractured British–Irish relations, with post-war British cinema responding with a ‘darker view … of national treachery’, the Irish countryside ‘represented as a dark, malevolent space whose depiction drew closely on the Gothic rather than the pastoral tradition of representation’.60 Part of Emmy’s fatal femininity is derived from her Irishness and firmly established in the opening scenes when she’s shown bringing chaos to her home village in Ireland. She is positioned in the English cultural consciousness as an outsider figure, an alieninvader to the English landscape. This gives her licence to perform fatal femininity, whilst the femme figure here assumes a wider political significance. The film does retain its Cornish elements through the medium of landscape, which is also put to use in constructing the femme. Despite the ostensible Yorkshire setting for the scenes where Emmy is banished to England, the film was shot on location in Cornwall with some of the more dramatic sequences being filmed at recognizable Cornish locations such as Hellsmouth near Perranporth. Studio press releases frequently stressed the film’s Cornish setting. The Cornish landscape is, as Rachel Moseley has argued, simultaneously ‘familiar and strange’, occupying a place within the British imaginary as ‘the domestic exotic’, and within post-war British film history this landscape was often used to represent the ‘desirable, dangerous woman’.61 In Daughter of Darkness, Emmy is linked with this landscape in ways which suggest dangerous femininity. In a key scene, after murdering one of her male victims,

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6. Emmy entices David in Daughter of Darkness (1948)

Emmy is dramatically shot from a cliff-top at high angle, running along the beach. The camera then cuts to a close-up of her scrambling barefoot amongst the rocks and pools and then standing staring out at the pounding sea. She encounters a young fisherman, David (whom she later murders), who advises her not to ‘bide there too long … it ’ain’t healthy’. Emmy’s response that this is her ‘favourite spot’ signals her as a regular visitor to the deserted cove and establishes her connection with the dramatic Cornish landscape. Indeed, a very clear distinction is drawn between the English pastoral landscape where the farm is situated – gently rolling fields stocked with sheep and cows – and the dramatic Cornish coastline. Emmy is an outsider-figure to the farm whilst the seascape provides her with a more natural habitat. Conversely Bess and the other women are never shown to venture beyond the farm. Emmy is thus positioned as doubly divergent, through both her Irishness and her connection with the Cornish landscape. This divergence extends to sexuality, which is signalled through the parallels Emmy draws between herself and the sea:

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It’s just like me that sea, nothing holds it back. You’d never think it had such strength. And then its hands come out and crash on the rocks and tear at them, and all the thunder is in your ears.

As a commentary on female sexuality, it is here given the force of nature and signalled as destructive and unbridled. Emmy’s sexual power is presented as something that she struggles and fails to control. She admits, ‘something terrible rises up in me and I can’t breathe’. In this respect she functions as an embodiment of Doane’s model of the femme fatale whereby ‘[h]er power is of a peculiar sort insofar as it is usually not subject to her conscious will’.62 This suggests a lack of agency and indeed Doane goes on to argue that the femme ‘has power despite herself ’. Emmy herself seems to abdicate responsibility, claiming ‘Can I help it if wherever I go the men’s eyes follow me … it’s no fault of mine’. Within this framework, power in the form of sexual power takes possession of the femme fatale, and the notion of ‘possession’ was a recurring feature of promotional material for the film. Suggested advertising angles for exhibitors included ‘what was the strange power of Emmy?’, ‘possessed by the devil’ and ‘terrified by her power over men’.63 The female body, possessed by an external force (a theme common to gothic horror), suggests the femme to be, in Doane’s words, ‘not the subject of power but its carrier’, with the attendant ‘connotations of disease’ that accompany this observation.64 This resonates with Bess’s later claim that Emmy is ‘rotten’, and thus the threat of contagion to the English pastoral idyll is linked to the Irish outsider figure. Doane’s observation that the femme lacks agency is not entirely borne out by Emmy’s characterization which, as I shall demonstrate later, does brings some particular challenges to bear on this model of fatal femininity. Whilst Emmy is signalled as exotic, possessed of a strange power and therefore threatening (David, bewildered, can only weakly observe ‘you’re not like a servant girl at all’), like the Cornish landscape she is simultaneously ‘domestic’ and familiar. She is complimented on her actual domestic skills on more than one occasion (Bess comments ‘she does her work well’ and she enjoys polishing the silver) and in this respect she performs the role of biddable and obedient servant girl. She is typically dressed in modest clothing: blouses with ‘peter pan’ collars, pretty embroidered dresses, flat shoes and a cross on a chain around her neck. Indeed the challenge for the film’s dress stylist (Dorothy Sinclair) was how to design a wardrobe that would ‘attract the admiration of men’ whilst remaining sufficiently ‘demure’.65 Reviews of the film

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likewise focused on the duality of Emmy’s character, her ‘wistfulness and innocence, shot through with a suggestion of evil’.66 Her seduction technique consists of nothing more than a downward glance and seemingly shy half-smile when sexual power appears to overtake her. That she proves irresistible to men despite never actively seeking them out indicates that her power is ‘not subject to her conscious will’. One farmhand declares ‘I can’t hold myself back’ whilst another comments ‘there’s something about you Emmy, I don’t know what it is but … you’ve got something alright’. It is the combination of deadliness and innocence, the domestic and the exotic that characterizes this particular femme. Emmy is in many respects the ‘ideal servant’ – hard-working, quiet and demure – and this masquerade of biddable femininity permits her to infiltrate the English pastoral idyll and the family setting. There are clear parallels here with Ann Todd’s characters where a masquerade of frigidity is used to disguise or detract from her sexual desire, and Lockwood’s ‘Karachi-Norwood interface’, pressed into service in Bedelia as she performs as the perfect wife and scheming murderess. All cases point to the importance of recognizing the role played by the domestic and the ordinary in an understanding of the British femme fatale. In common with many films noir, the central concern of Daughter of Darkness is an investigation of the femme fatale and her sexuality. What is particularly noteworthy about this film is that the investigation is undertaken by a woman – a situation which gives considerable narrative space to the dynamics between two women: the fatal femme, Emmy (young and unmarried), and Bess (slightly older and married, but without children). Through casting, the two women are positioned as opposites – the fair ‘English Rose’ versus the ‘dark Celtic beauty’,67 – but Bess is simultaneously disgusted by Emmy (‘she repels me, I don’t know why’) and fascinated with her. As Gledhill has demonstrated, noir investigation uses confession as a narrative mode and Bess is positioned as a confessor figure in this narrative, confronting Emmy and forcing her to confess to violating the codes of female sexuality.68 In two key scenes Bess challenges Emmy: ‘What made you leave your village in Ireland? I want to know why, tell me! They didn’t like you, did they? Why, Why?!’ and later, ‘You’re going to tell me what’s behind this filthy thing, I’ll shake it out of you … Answer me!’. Bess is a redundant investigator because the audience already know what happened in Ireland and her interrogation brings no new evidence to bear on the killings. What actually motivates Bess is a desire to hear, in detail, Emmy’s sexual transgressions. Stott, in her discussion of the femme

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fatale, draws on a Foucauldian framework to argue that ‘confession produces sexual discourse whilst appearing to repress sexuality’,69 and these ideas structure the narrative of Daughter of Darkness. Bess produces Emmy as the embodiment of transgressive female sexual desire (‘You’re a bit of a flirt, aren’t you’, ‘I believe you’re rotten’), inciting her to talk (‘Where have you been?’ ‘What have you been up to?’ ‘Did you know him’), whilst she simultaneously works to regulate her (‘You don’t bring those habits onto this farm’, ‘You’ll pack your things … and get out of this house’). Bess’s actions are ostensibly motivated by protecting the community but call female sexuality into being, allowing it to be displayed before being legitimately destroyed. In this case female sexuality is not subjected to ‘the voice of male judgement’, as Gledhill finds in many American noirs,70 but rather, in this British context, female judgement and regulation: in the end it is Bess who casts Emmy out of the community to almost certain death. The older married woman is positioned as the gatekeeper for the community’s sexual mores and bears the responsibility for reconstructing the domestic realm (ideas which would have had currency in the post-war period), but this is achieved through a process that allows her to confront, head-on, female sexual desire which is shown to be fascinating to her. Nor does Bess’s interrogation go unchallenged. At various points when Emmy is confronted she responds with ‘I have my rights’, ‘Perhaps you’d better not threaten me’ and ‘You shouldn’t speak to me like that’. Emmy’s comments suggest a degree of independence and agency; the young woman is given a voice and attempts at regulation are negotiated and, at times, thwarted. Emmy’s motivation for murder is not financial gain and in a manner similar to Lockwood’s Bedelia she desires vengeance. She is a sympathetic figure in contrast to the inhabitants of her original Irish village who despise and hound her and the Yorkshire farm owners whose middle-class world is oppressive and smug. She visits vengeance on the men who desire her (‘All of them whispering, staring, grinning’) and the communities that exclude her (‘The women, so dreadful to me’). Whilst most killings are presented as the result of a murderous sexual power that has risen up, seemingly involuntarily, inside her, on one occasion she actively takes control of her sexual power. She seeks out and murders Larry, Bess’s younger brother, as punishment for Bess’s hubris and the intolerance of the wider community of which Bess is a figurehead. The young lowerclass female is shown to actively seek reparations for her outsider status and she has somewhat more agency than Doane’s model permits. Furthermore, if many representations of transgressive female sexuality

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come to, as Doane argues, ‘take on a life of [their] own’71 then what is particularly memorable in Daughter of Darkness is the fascination female sexuality is shown to have for women, as much as men. Conclusion As I have shown in this chapter, post-war British cinema did produce home-grown femmes fatales, and in a manner more diffuse and complex that has been widely recognized. Looking to female-centred melodramas, gothic and period features rather than the ‘Spiv cycle’ allows a different picture to emerge where fatal femininity is evident across a broad canvas. Aspinall’s statement that ‘there were few memorable images of strong women in British films’ is incorrect. Similarly, Wolfenstein and Leites’ claim that British films failed to ‘take the destructive potentialities of women seriously’. British articulations of fatal femininity (like their Hollywood counterparts) pointed to female agency and transgressive sexuality, which, as I have demonstrated, were portrayed in particular and nuanced ways. Whilst ‘resident outsiders’ such as Gynt had greater licence to perform a type of fatale femininity more readily associated with Hollywood femmes, the performative aspects of her star persona – and her place within the British consciousness – pulled against character type and foregrounded sharply the femme as a figure of male fantasy predicated on anxiety and neurosis. In addition to the role of the fatal women, Gynt was simultaneously constructed as the stylish society women with an enviable wardrobe addressed through publicity to a desiring female audience. Ann Todd’s characters illustrate a very different type of sexuality; one where sexual desire is typically restrained and only periodically disrupts a seemingly implacable façade. Whilst never overtly aggressive, her characters are highly attuned to the masquerade of femininity and the workings of female sexual stereotypes which women can appropriate to disguise or detract from their intent. Daughter of Darkness makes imaginative use of a particular rural landscape to construct a femme fatale who is simultaneously exotic and ordinary and presents unregulated female sexuality as a source of fascination for other women. More generally, understandings of the British femme fatale from this period need to recognize the importance of the domestic and the ordinary in codifying dangerous femininity. The placing of these female murderers within a domestic setting and the portrayal of seemingly ordinary women in extremis should not be understood as a lack or a

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failure to perform convincingly as femmes fatales, but is in fact integral to characterizing British fatal femininity. Typically, aspects of normative femininity (domestic, biddable, sexually demure or disinterested) are set alongside more transgressive or exotic elements in a manner which points to masquerade and the performativity of female/feminine stereotypes. What emerges from these films is a sense of the importance of role-play at this time, of ‘trying on’ different female personas, each of which makes different demands on the wearer and elicits different responses and rewards. The women choose between suitable and unsuitable husbands and lovers, between being biddable and the desire for ‘something more’, whilst the men are shown as profoundly untrustworthy; predatory, manipulative or neurotic. These films share a connection which needs to be more widely recognized with other postwar films such as It Always Rains on Sunday and Madonna of the Seven Moons; the better-known examples of how British cinema dramatized the theme of female choice against a backdrop of wider uncertainties about gender roles that were shaping the social consciousness at this time. This cycle of film-making was a feature of the immediate postwar years and the output of female-centred melodrama and period features waned in the 1950s, replaced by the popular comedy and war genres, and the social-problem film. The crime genre likewise experienced a downturn and the criminal underworld and the more psychologically complex ‘morbid’ films were increasingly relegated to secondary features.72 Debates about female agency and transgressive female sexuality did not disappear but shifted gear, emerging most strongly in the social-problem genre which linked female sexuality to criminality. For example, in the ‘prostitute’ films of the late 1950s (the focus of Chapter Five) an interest in the social problem of the prostitute is combined with a popular fear of – and fascination with – organized crime. In the next chapter I will discuss the quintessential 1950s figure of the housewife positioned within the companionate marriage, seemingly the embodiment of normative femininity but, as I shall demonstrate, no less a complex and transgressive figure than the femme fatale.

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3

The Comedy-of-Marriage Film In many respects marriage, housework and the domestic realm is the quintessential subject of the 1950s; a decade widely understood as the ‘golden age of marriage’ where the image of the ‘wife and mother’ (the post-war icon of femininity) embedded itself in the popular consciousness.1 The work by revisionist historians such as Claire Langhamer and Lesley Hall (discussed in the main Introduction) has done much to challenge this formation, but in mass cultural forms such as popular film there is scope for a broader consideration of how the gender roles within heterosexual marriage were configured. Whilst the subject of the housewife and mother was manifest in the genre of social-realism (Mandy, 1952, and Woman in a Dressing Gown, 1957, are the two best-known examples, thoughtfully discussed by Annette Kuhn and John Hill, respectively)2, popular comedy as a genre is particularly fruitful for analysis as it readily allows for dissent, chaos and unordered worlds, where forms of normality are inverted and social tensions can find a freer expression than in other modes. Divided into three parts, this chapter opens with a discussion of social context and how ideas about ‘companionship’ and ‘equal and different roles’ increasingly shaped marriage and gender relations in the period. An overview of British film comedy and the emergent cycle of the ‘comedy-of-marriage’ film sketches a map of how domestic cinema responded to these new forms of marriage and domestic life, at times drawing on genre conventions from screwball comedy and the trope of gender role reversal. Detailed critical analysis of three films, Raising a Riot (d. Wendy Toye 1955), To Dorothy a Son (d. Muriel Box 1954) and Young Wives’ Tale (d. Henry Cass 1951), explores the manner in which the domestic realm and relations between the heterosexual couple are imagined and the extent to which they can be interrogated, concluding that the women who shaped the creative direction of these films (Wendy Toye, Muriel Box and the scriptwriter Anne Burnaby) found comedy a genre conducive to an expression of sexual politics.

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The Companionate Marriage and the Home Marriage, the family and motherhood were high on the social agenda in the post-war period after six years of conflict during which the phenomena of evacuation, working mothers and absent fathers were thought to have exacted a heavy toll on the fabric of society. Reconstructing ‘the family’ assumed national importance and it was in relation to the concept of ‘the family’ and ‘the home’ that debates crystallized concerning women and employment, the birth-rate and the role of the woman as housewife and mother. Numerous government commissions reported on issues that directly concerned the family: the 1942 Beveridge Report on the welfare state, the 1946 Curtis Committee on child welfare, the Royal Commission on Population (1945–49) and the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce (1951–55). In all of these, heterosexual marriage was the assumed, privileged mechanism through which the ‘legitimate’ nuclear family would prosper, and the ‘family home’ the appropriate location within which ‘family life could be re-established and safeguarded’.3 As commented on by a female Mass Observation panellist in 1942, ‘a happy home and family life is the bulwark of a Nation’, a view that encapsulated the template for post-war reconstruction.4 But the manner in which marriage was understood, certainly within sociological discourse, changed in the 1950s.5 The notion of ‘companionship’ in marriage, with equal and complementary roles taken by women and men, was an increasing and noticeable feature of gender relations in Britain. The Royal Commission on Population commented on ‘the wife’s role as companion to her husband as well as a producer of children’.6 Likewise the Beveridge Report, which was predicated on the idea that the ‘breadwinner-husband’ and ‘house-wife’ worked together as a team towards a common goal of raising children. Notions of men and women as companions or partners engaged in ‘team-work’ shaped ideas about marriage which, Elizabeth Wilson argues, ‘aspired to a democratic ideal’ in the post-war years and beyond.7 These ideas were not only confined to official prescriptions but also emerged in mass media publications including advice literature, magazines and popular fiction. Janet Winship demonstrates how the discourse of the companionate marriage was evident in women’s magazines of the 1950s with the ‘Tackle it together’ column on home improvements a regular and popular feature in Woman magazine, the contemporary woman’s trade paper.8 The notion of marriage as a partnership was central to popular romantic fiction where a ‘respect [for] one another’s

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gifts and talents … [shaped] the idealized marriage of the hero and heroine’.9 Innumerable ‘how-to’ manuals were produced in the 1950s which instructed men and women in the practicalities of modern marriage and childcare. Mary Macaulay’s popular The Art of Marriage (1952, reprinted 1957) advocated ‘harmony of body, mind and spirit’ in the achievement of the ‘modern democratic marriage’.10 Dr John Gibbens’ popular childcare manual The Care of Young Babies advocated that the couple ‘think of the child as a joint project’, whilst marriage manuals discussed sexual pleasure within marriage and how men might sexually educate their wives,11 assuming, as did most commentators, that men and women’s sexual needs were different and divided along an active/passive axis. Such matters concerned the National Marriage Guidance Council, which in the 1950s (relative to its inception in 1938) experienced a particularly rapid growth in the number of its trained counsellors. The Council’s remit was to assist couples towards achieving a happy marriage where both partners were fulfilled sexually and emotionally.12 Despite a rise in the number of divorce cases in the immediate post-war years as couples sought to dissolve imprudent wartime marriages, marriage remained popular in Britain, with an increase in the number of people getting married and a reduction in age at first marriage.13 Irrespective of the reality that men and women in Britain through their actions broadly supported the institution of marriage, the amount of critical commentary the subject attracted suggests how certain anxieties and uncertainties about gender relations and roles were shaping the social fabric. Within the companionate marriage, men and women had separate and clearly defined roles. Gender relations at this time had settled into a framework of equal but different. As Summerfield indicates, the companionate marriage was widely thought to be based on equality, but an equality that was shaped by the ‘language of difference’.14 For Wilson the characteristic that defined the late 1940s onwards was recognition of ‘the sexual division of labour and the value of women’s “equal but different” role’.15 Men and women thus presided over separate spheres and possessed separate yet complementary skills and qualities. Each was considered an expert in their own field and for women this field was childcare and housework. It was widely acknowledged, of course, that many women did work outside the home, but paid employment for most women was imagined as secondary to the role of housewife and mother. It was commonplace at this time to think of ‘homemaking as a career’ for all women irrespective of their class background, but one of the biggest obstacles to the woman’s successful undertaking of

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the housewife’s role was ‘drudgery’.16 Beveridge commented in 1948 that the job faced by the housewife with a large family was ‘frankly impossible’,17 and a number of state interventions were proposed. Policy-makers and social commentators believed the housewife would be supported through the new National Health Service and family allowances, whilst domestic drudgery would be removed by the extension of modern working practices into the home, and through direct home improvements in the shape of modern kitchens replete with new ‘labour-saving’ devices such as washing-machines and vacuum cleaners – items which were enviably present in Hollywood films at this time. The difficulty facing the modern housewife was widely and sympathetically recognized because the burden borne by the middleclass wife had increased sharply by this time. Numbers in residential domestic service declined rapidly in the post-war period, from two million in 1931 to 750,000 in 195118 and the middle-class housewife was faced with running the home with no residential help, or at best occasional support from ‘a daily’.19 The removal of drudgery (however achieved) was therefore a necessity in the dignifying of housewifery as a ‘career’ which could be deemed suitable for all women, but most particularly the middle classes, and which would permit them to enjoy ‘the more stimulating and rewarding aspects of childcare and the beautification of the home’.20 The distinction drawn between ‘creative homemaking’ and ‘the rough of household maintenance’ was one of the strategies through which the middle-class housewife attempted to maintain a hierarchical class division.21 Household appliances in particular were held up as the housewives’ saviour because of the commonly held belief that they required little effort to operate, perpetuating, as Wilson argues, ‘the myth … that housework hardly was housework anymore’.22 Winship illustrates how magazine advertising for domestic appliances at this time reiterated the common motif that ‘commodities … work by themselves’. This was an advertising fallacy that effectively concealed all traces of ‘the real labour … [still] performed by women’ in their utilization of those commodities.23 In addition to the removal of drudgery through household appliances, the extension of management practices from industry into the home assumed that housework could be made less onerous through better organization and planning, which would allow it to be managed in a ‘scientific’ manner. New products and household goods such as washing-up bowls and bed mattresses appeared made of new man-made materials like plastics and latex foam that allowed the

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home to be run in new and efficient ways.24 In the ‘modern’ home, dustcollecting door panels were to be covered with hardboard, picture rails removed and sliding frameless windows installed, all with the intention of creating a continuous, smooth surface and an open space devoid of clutter.25 These ideas were enthusiastically taken up by advertisers and promoted in women’s magazines and the burgeoning ‘Do-It-Yourself ’ manuals. Features in Picture Post (March 1950), for example, focused on the mechanization of the domestic environment where the ‘modern streamlined and highly-equipped home’ ushered in the ‘coming of ease and efficiency to the kitchen’, with ‘work processes’ organized in such a way that household management could be undertaken by the housewife with maximum efficiency, and the home would be ‘liberated from drudgery’.26 Despite such utopian promises, more immediate and pressing concerns had to be addressed before women and men could take up their roles within the companionate marriage. During the war, a halt of the country’s slum clearance and building programme was compounded by the Blitz which left Britain desperately short of suitable accommodation. The immediate post-war rise in the birthrate and the increase in the numbers of young married couples with children placed additional pressures on a system already stretched to breaking point, which in turn led to what Langhamer terms ‘an intensified romance with home life’27 which the country was clearly struggling to meet. The large number of young couples who through necessity started married life living with their parents was at odds with the increasing value placed on ‘domestic privacy’ – a trend which had begun before the war and intensified in the post-war period.28 Ernest Bevin’s rash promise of ‘Five million homes in quick time’ proved to be a popular vote winner and helped sweep the Labour Party to victory in 1945.29 It’s clear that housing, home-making, marriage, the family and women’s roles were shaped by complex – and at times contradictory – inter-locking discourses that found expression in particular ways in both official publications and the mass media. British Film Comedy How did popular cinema respond to the rebuilding of family life and to changes in how heterosexual marriage was imagined at this time? Certainly the issue of ‘parenting’ assumed prominence in the cinema of the decade, with the adult–child relationship returned to repeatedly

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by film-makers operating in a broadly realist vein. This ranged from troublesome adolescents and the newly emerging teenager in films at both ends of the decade – I Believe in You (1952) and Beat Girl (1959) – to relations between preadolescent children in search of strong male ‘father-figures’ – Tiger Bay (1959), The Yellow Balloon (1952), Jacqueline (1956), Mandy (1952), The Spanish Gardener (1956). The nuclear family was likewise well represented in the popular ‘Hugget’ series, starting with Holiday Camp (1947), which dramatized the everyday exploits of a ‘respectable’ working-class family featuring Jack Warner as the benign patriarch. Some of the most interesting manifestations of the trials and tribulations of the heterosexual couple were to be found in the genre of comedy which, as Haywood has argued, functions as an ‘arena where repressed tensions can be released in a safe manner’.30 Comedy occupies a central place in debates about 1950s British cinema culture. Alongside the war genre it was consistently popular at the box office, with British viewers preferring the domestic product to the Hollywood variant.31 Within this wide-ranging genre, numerous sub-categories and popular ‘series’ emerged. The Boulting brothers’ forte was the satirical comedy which attacked British bureaucracy and institutional structures such as the army (Private’s Progress, 1956), education (Lucky Jim, 1957) and the legal profession (Brothers-in-Law, 1957), offering an increasingly cynical view of human nature and motivation.32 Ealing continued to mine its comic vein with The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955), whilst Launder and Gilliat’s ‘St Trinian’s’ series (inaugurated by the success of The Happiest Days of Your Life, 1950) focused on the battle of the sexes. Service comedies in particular were popular during the decade, offering what Spicer aptly terms a ‘worm’s eye view’ of the war.33 Films such as Carry On Sergeant (1958, which inaugurated the popular ‘Carry On’ series) and Operation Bullshine (1959) inverted and mocked the ‘noble’ struggle and sacrifice of the officer middle class portrayed in war dramas such as The Dam Busters (1955), offering instead a carnivalesque view of the war from a typically working-class perspective.34 Consistently successful at the box office was the ‘Doctor’ series (1954 onwards) which followed the fortunes of four student doctors and combined topical themes (meritocracy, politics of consensus) with a handsome, youthful cast headed by Dirk Bogarde. Mainstays of British comedy in the 1950s were films that focused on ‘the couple’ and the experience of marriage, and which engaged, directly and selectively, with the new forms of marriage and domestic

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life that were emerging in British society. The type of comedy film produced in the 1950s where ‘the couple’ provided the central narra­ tive drive differed markedly from earlier post-war romantic comedies such as Blithe Spirit (1945) and Miranda (1948), which combined a ‘fantasy’ theme (ghosts and mermaids respectively) with an upper middle class setting. In the 1950s this upper-class fantasy setting was replaced by a concern for ‘real’ everyday life and the ‘here and now’ of contemporary living, as experienced by a broader and more inclusive middle class. Pace Raymond Durgnant, who argued that ‘[m]arriage fatigue … is rarely a principal theme’,35 British cinema did respond to the subject of marriage and not always in ways that were blithely celebratory. The films in this loose cycle range from more traditional romantic comedies and the genre convention of ‘boy meets girl’ (Value for Money, 1955; An Alligator Named Daisy, 1955), to films that focus on the newly-wed couple and readjustment during the first year of married life (For Better, For Worse, 1954), to those such as Simon and Laura (1955) where the verbal sparring between a well-established married couple is reminiscent of classic Hollywood screwball comedy. Comedies that are centrally concerned with the couple have particular genre conventions and it is useful to sketch out some of those that relate most closely to the British films under discussion. Screwball comedy (of which Bringing Up Baby (1938) is the paradigmatic example) focuses on ‘a principal couple from differing backgrounds whose initial antagonism gradually turns into romantic love’ – a process typically achieved through the characters learning to change and modify their view.36 Their antagonism, and attraction, is typically expressed through witty dialogue, accidents and misadventures. As accidents often have a dual meaning – Freud argued that ‘falling, stumbling and slipping need not always be interpreted as purely accidental miscarriages of motor action’37 – they function in the comedy genre more broadly as symptoms of an unconscious desire for change, and in the couplecentred comedy specifically as symptomatic of ‘gender trouble’. In romantic comedy more generally, romance and marriage are shown as conflicting goals and for this reason the action culminates in a wedding rather than married life.38 Despite the dominant trope of heterosexual courtship, there is a significant sub-genre of ‘marriage comedies’ that focus on the estranged married couple who have become romantically ‘out-of-sync’, and whose marital relations need to be realigned. In what Stanley Cavell terms the comedy of remarriage, ‘the drive of the plot is not to get the central pair together, but to get them back together, together again’.39 Thus in films such as The Awful Truth (1937) and

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Adam’s Rib (1949) the couple gradually reconnect with what originally attracted them to their spouse, and matrimonial harmony is restored. The ability of couples to change and understand their partner’s position can at times be achieved through adopting a form of role reversal; a standard narrative device for eliciting humour and entertainment. Often delivered through forms of incongruity and exaggeration, role reversal throws into sharp relief something considered everyday and ordinary, exploring it from a different perspective that allows new understandings to emerge. As a narrative device it is well suited to couple-centred comedies, and forms of role reversal are found, for example, in the ‘male transvestism’ that is central to key examples of the genre such as Bringing Up Baby40 and Some Like It Hot (1959). British Marriage Comedies Whilst these brief examples have been drawn from classical Hollywood cinema, the points raised about the conventions of genre (across screwball, romantic comedy and comedies of remarriage) have a strong bearing on the British comedy-of-marriage films which draw on – and at times modify – those conventions to meet the needs of a domestic cinema operating in a particular national context. It is noteworthy that these British comedies work outside the conventions of Hollywood romantic comedy by introducing children into the plot. In the Holly­ wood variant children are rare – the baby in Bringing Up Baby is a leopard, for example – whilst the British comedies, in affording children narrative space, are part of the decade’s broader concern with families and the adult–child relationship. The film most widely discussed in the context of the marriage comedy is the Rank production Genevieve (1953), whose significant commercial and critical success inaugurated the cycle. The film deals with two couples, one married, one not, where the men’s enthusiasm for the London to Brighton vintage car rally marginalizes the women who find the race, and their men, increasingly childish and boring. The work of the narrative is to realign these couples into a harmonious companionate relationship. Christine Geraghty, in her reading of Kay Kendall and the companionate marriage in British film comedy, argues that in Genevieve and Kendall’s later film The Constant Husband (1955) there is less equality and balance between the heterosexual couple than Schatz’s model, derived from Hollywood romantic comedy, permits. For Geraghty narrative resolution in Genevieve is achieved at the expense

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of the women who have to make ‘the move into a more sympathetic position with their men’.41 Furthermore, the women suffer a range of humiliations during the car race (dishevelled hair, wet clothes) that are designed to puncture their ‘aloofness’42 and undermine further their position. For Geraghty, Genevieve is evidence of the wider tendency in British popular genres such as comedy to portray women as ‘childish, silly and vindictive or valorised and saintly’,43 a tendency which, as I discussed in the main Introduction, sheds light on the failure of domestic cinema to imagine in any positive way the new, ‘modern’ woman of the 1950s. Whilst there is much about Geraghty’s reading of Genevieve that is persuasive (although I question whether the mechanisms for narrative closure are sufficient to completely eradicate the style, independence and spirit of the women – especially Kendall’s character), what is less convincing is the extrapolation from this film to wider comments about film comedy and its portrayal of women. Taking other films into consideration and broadening the field of enquiry allows a more balanced picture to emerge. Spicer’s work on the middle-class boy-next-door (as a 1950s variant on the cultural type of ‘The Everyman’) suggests that other romantic and marriage comedies from the period (An Alligator Named Daisy; Twice Round the Daffodils, 1962, for example) ‘open[ed] up a space, albeit a highly controlled one, in which women were allowed to be sharply critical of male behaviour … [and] could also be the educator of the male’.44 In this chapter I will explore in some detail three comedies-ofmarriage that help to broaden our understanding of how British popular cinema engaged with, and responded to, the subject of marriage, gender relations and roles within marriage. Raising a Riot (1955) is a role reversal film where a husband takes over his wife’s role as housewife and mother to their three children. To Dorothy a Son (1954) is another form of role reversal where a husband assumes the domestic burden under the supervision of his heavily pregnant wife (a figure rarely found in British cinema at this time).45 The focus of Young Wives’ Tale (1951) is the disharmony and friction between two married couples, both with young children, who share a house due to the housing shortage. In all cases the couples have been married for some time and are therefore beyond the courtship and honeymoon phase of their relationships. As established married couples, comedy is derived from their evident failures to achieve marital harmony and a mocking of the conventions of heterosexual relations and normative gender roles. Each film places different emphasis on aspects of the companionate marriage: Riot focuses on the woman’s role within the

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family whilst Dorothy raises questions about remarriage and divorce. Young Wives’ Tale is the most complex of the three in tackling a number of themes (remarriage, romance, gender roles, equality, the working mother) and for this reason I have allocated it considerable space in my discussion. Housework is important in these three films in a way that isn’t shown in Simon and Laura or Genevieve. In this respect the films speak to an earlier understanding of the domestic burden borne by the housewife, and the later recognition (through role reversal) that the burden still hasn’t been addressed and it remains an impossible one. All of the films are broadly concerned with the education of the male, and it is noteworthy that these are films where women had a direct impact in the production process. Raising a Riot was directed by Wendy Toye for British Lion and, as Harper and Porter have demonstrated, she took total artistic control of the film46 and endowed it with a wry treatment of the male figure which was the mark of her particular brand of feminism. To Dorothy a Son was directed by Muriel Box, whose more overt feminist sensibility is evident in this work, whilst Young Wives’ Tale, although directed by a man, Henry Cass, bears traces of its scriptwriter Anne Burnaby and her ironic stance on gender politics. Although this chapter doesn’t focus in detail on the question of authorship it seems likely that the marriage comedy genre proved a relatively hospitable space for female creative agency in popular cinema, not least because its focus on marriage and the domestic could more readily align with what could be thought of as women’s ‘natural’ instincts and interests. Certainly in classic Hollywood cinema Babington and Evans find that the genre of romantic comedy was strongly ‘female-influenced’ through women’s work as scriptwriters, novelists whose work was adapted, and scenarists, leading them to conclude that the ‘innate demands’ of the couple-centred comedy ‘are the projections of a desire to enforce a respect for the feminine’.47 British cinema’s female-influenced marriage comedies likewise demonstrate a strong desire that the feminine be recognized and respected. Raising a Riot In Raising a Riot (1955) middle-aged, middle-class Tony (Kenneth More) returns from the navy to civilian life where he assumes full domestic responsibility for the couple’s three children whilst his wife travels abroad to look after her sick mother. He decamps with the children (and assorted animals) to his father’s home, a dilapidated

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windmill in the countryside, where he attempts to recreate family life. The demands of everyday domestic routine such as cleaning and cooking and the entertaining, schooling and disciplining of the children quickly dominate his life. He is soon forced to abandon his aspirations as a writer as the role of mother and housewife consumes all of his time, and he gratefully welcomes the return of his wife, having come to understand and appreciate the role that woman are required to undertake. The film is topical in both placing the young family within the home of the older generation, which entails a loss of domestic privacy, and in dealing with a returning serviceman who clearly knows little about his children and has to rebuild relationships and regain their trust and a place in their affections. In this respect it is consistent with many other British films from the period that dramatize the reconstruction of the post-war family through the theme of parenting and the male father-figure. What marks it as different is the male’s complete appropriation of the female role. The central concern of the film in terms of gender politics is neither romance nor companionship between the heterosexual couple, but coming to an understanding of the woman’s role within the family. Although the wife is absent for most of the film she is omnipresent through the narrative’s focus on the domestic realm. Through this inversion of gender roles, comedy is derived from the seemingly incongruous image of the man struggling to fulfil the ‘natural’ female role. Landy argues that ‘[b]y means of the role reversal, the film defamiliarizes and lends a certain drama to the everyday tasks associated with women’s work in the home’.48 The familiar, everyday and therefore invisible work of the housewife is thrown into sharp relief when the male experiences this environment as alien and fraught with difficulty. As Lloyd and Johnson demonstrate in their study of the post-war housewife in Hollywood films, it is precisely because domestic labour is ‘invisible to the economy and culture’ that it is only documented on film when it is ‘aberrant, unusual or strange’.49 This process of defamiliarization is complemented by the casting of Kenneth More in the lead role. Coming after his recent successes in Genevieve and Doctor in the House (1954), More’s persona was associated with a confident middle-class masculinity described by Films and Filming in 1955 as ‘a symbol of everything we like to think of as English’50 and by Picturegoer in 1956 as ‘a contemporary actor who reflects the mood of today’.51 More is seen as representative of the nation by embodying normative rather than deviant masculinity and the humour derives, in part, from such a masculine persona taking up

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an ‘aberrant’ feminine role. Part of the challenge faced by Toye’s film is to soften this persona and to inculcate in it a respect for the feminine.52 That the film received positive notices in the press and enjoyed popular success at the box office suggests that it succeeded in creating an address that was palatable to audiences.53 For Monthly Film Bulletin it was an ‘unpretentious film [which] contains a good deal of simple charm and affectionate humour’, whilst Kinematograph Weekly’s classification of it as a ‘woman’s film, as well as a certain rib-tickler’ suggests an appeal to both sexes.54 The setting plays an important part in Tony’s acquisition of the feminine domestic role. The windmill is dilapidated and only partly converted into a barely habitable living space. The living-room is dominated by a range, despairingly described by Tony as ‘a classic example of early Victorian domestic engineering’, whilst the kitchen is basic in the extreme, comprising a sink, table and stove. There is no hot water as the boiler has yet to be fitted, the loo is outside and the bathroom, as the father acerbically comments, is ‘well, a room with a bath in it’. The living space is as far removed as possible from the ‘modern efficient home’ replete with modern appliances that had been heralded as the housewife’s saviour by everyone from Beveridge to the appliance advertisers. As for most middle-class families in the 1950s, the task Tony faces of bringing up the children is compounded by the absence of servants. Tony is horrified to learn that not even ‘comers-in’ will venture to the windmill and his blithe comment that he can cook ‘in an emergency’ is punctured by his father’s blunt statement that ‘it’s all an emergency if you’re stopping here’. His time is thus occupied with domestic drudgery rather than being freed up to concentrate on the more stimulating and rewarding aspects of childcare and home beautification which I argued in the introduction were deemed a necessary component to dignifying housewifery as a career for the middle classes. Tony’s situation is that of the ‘ordinary’ housewife faced with childcare, housework and homemaking with little or no support. The father provides no help with the day-to-day running of the home and the children, instead occupying himself with house renovations such as tiling; activities consistent with ‘gendered discourses of appropriateness’ that shaped male work in the home during this period.55 In his constant badgering of Tony to prepare meals and meet his idiosyncratic demands for ‘three slices of toast … crisp!’ he assumes the role of the demanding husband, expecting his needs for food to be met without a thought to how meals are arrived at. Tony quickly

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learns that the dishes remain unwashed and the potato peelings stay in the sink until he removes them. In the face of these unremitting demands on his time his attempts at writing are constantly thwarted, and throughout the film creative work is shown to be incompatible with domesticity. The narrative is organized around a number of episodes that detail the different and mundane aspects of childcare and housekeeping. Tony shops, cooks a meal, washes clothes, supervises teeth and hair-brushing at bedtime and entertains, disciplines and consoles the children. His initial approach is to blithely proclaim that housekeeping is ‘only a matter of organization’; an approach which resonates with post-war discourses that extended management practices into the home. Any sort of implicit criticism that the woman is incompetent in her approach to household management is rapidly dismissed as Tony struggles to succeed. His initial optimism is soon tempered by a more pragmatic approach which realizes the advantage of tinned food and quickly learns to dispense with the unnecessary tedium of washing each individual spinach leaf before cooking. His utopian vision of four cooked meals a day (and snacks in between) is modified (at the suggestion of a neighbour’s daughter, Sue) in favour of sandwiches and a fishing trip, consistent with the idea that children are more than work and should be enjoyed. Despite such necessary corner-cutting he soon becomes demoralized (‘I’m sick to death of grazed knees … and elevenses’) and he finds himself unable to approach any one task in a linear ordered manner. The fishing trip ends in disaster when the youngest child falls in the water, whilst a child tipping paint over herself interrupts his cooking, which results in a burnt meal. His response to the ruined food mirrors that commonly associated with the woman; he resorts to ‘feminine’ sulks, bad-temper and exasperation, much to the amusement of his father and eldest son. Whilst humour is clearly derived from the sight of the male acquiring feminine characteristics, the point is made that these are not natural, innate characteristics but are arrived at through circumstance, social practices and conditioning. Tony’s response to the burgeoning domestic chaos is an attempt to control it through imposing ‘naval discipline’; a masculinist project predicated on rationalist order. The children are frog-marched back to the home, given specific tasks to complete and then turned out for parade inspection, but this ‘marvellous system of inducing discipline’ (in the words of his neighbour’s daughter Sue) is completely undermined by the children’s riotous commando raid on a neighbour’s house. The depiction of his struggles is not an attempt to show that

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men are unequal to the task of domesticity, and indeed at one point his daughter confides to him that ‘Mummy used to have catastrophes’. The point is not to demonstrate that the man is better or worse than the woman but that the job is a hard one and competence in it is only acquired through exposure and trial and error. Part of Tony’s appreciation of the female role is acquired not only through the performance of domestic tasks but via his own feminization through clothing. His initial appearance in the off-duty naval officer’s ‘uniform’ of shirt, tie and double-breasted jacket is quickly replaced by a variety of colourful open-necked shirts and loose slacks, more in keeping with the less rigid environment of the windmill. Upon his arrival at the windmill he quickly dons an apron, visual shorthand for domesticity and feminization, but at this stage the garment worn is plain white and secured at waist level, and therefore still has some resonance with ‘the masculine’ (the professional garb of the chef or the grocer perhaps). But the process of feminization through clothing gathers pace as Tony becomes more embroiled in the domestic role. Hanging out washing he wears his apron whilst pegging out a child’s sprigged calico pinny. The tight framing and shot composition gives the appearance of him wearing a dress and to his chagrin he’s confronted by Sue (young and sexually available), his appearance eliciting her comment ‘the maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes’; a statement which both feminizes and infantilizes Tony through its association with nursery rhyme. It is after his failed attempt to run the house along strict naval lines that his feminization is completed. The white apron has been discarded in favour of a full-length pinny in lavender blue, with detail on the bust and matching frill trim, worn over a pink-checked shirt. It is at this point he admits the defeat of his masculinist project and demobilizes the (children’s) navy. Babington and Evans have suggested that male transvestism is part of the ‘educative process of feminization … [and the] absorption of aspects of [female] identity’,56 and clothing is clearly being used here in the transformation of character. Tony’s gradual metamorphosis from jacket to pinny-wearing is not only a device for humour but part of the process by which he comes to respect the feminine. This is encapsulated in the film’s final scene where he openly acknowledges to his wife the complex and contradictory demands of the woman’s role: ‘You know what a woman has to be? A cross between a saint and a drayhorse, a diplomat and an automatic washing machine, a psychiatrist and a bulldozer, a sanitary engineer and a mannequin.’ The film is, in the end, a liberal text that calls for greater understanding by

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7. Kenneth More in Raising a Riot (1955)

men of the difficulty of the female/domestic role. It does not advocate for radical change to the gendered status quo through a more equitable distribution of domestic roles and responsibility, but contents itself with a demonstration of the domestic role within marriage as complex and demanding. The film ends with the wife’s resumption of the household reins whilst the husband returns to naval work; thus a sexual division of labour is accepted. Although consistent with a discourse of equal but different that was shaping normative understandings of gender relations, implicit in the comedy is a modifying of the male views and a clear sense of bringing them into line with the female perspective. To Dorothy a Son To Dorothy a Son (1954) offers a different take on the role reversal comedy. Directed by Muriel Box, the film was independently financed by Muriel’s husband Sidney, but unfortunately its status as an ‘independent’ led to it being denied a West End premiere by

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distributors57 which in turn hampered its chances of commercial success. Muriel was one of the few female film directors in British cinema at this time and her feminist sensibility, constantly a thorn in the side of mainstream, male-dominated domestic film production, is evident in this film. The narrative centres on the claustrophobic and chaotic domestic scene experienced by young married couple Tony (John Gregson) and Dorothy (Peggy Cummins), who is heavily pregnant. Confined to her bed, Dorothy makes innumerable domestic demands on her increasingly frustrated husband, a composer who works from home and is desperately trying to meet a deadline and earn sufficient money to pay the bailiffs. Tony’s flamboyant American ex-wife Myrtle (Shelley Winters) reappears, bearing news that she will inherit her Uncle’s $2 million fortune if, by a given date and time, her former husband has not yet produced a son. Myrtle’s appearance intensifies the domestic chaos as she tries to seduce Tony, whilst Tony’s (erroneous) realization that they were never properly divorced pushes to breaking point his already difficult marriage to Dorothy. Ultimately a form of harmony is restored when Dorothy gives birth to twins, a girl and then a boy, and the three adults agree to share the inheritance. With its central focus on a couple who are out-of-sync and whose marital relations need to be realigned, the film borrows conventions typically associated with romantic comedy through the couple’s progression from what Schatz terms ‘romantic antagonism to eventual embrace’.58 The focus on the dynamic of the already married couple ensures that the narrative drive is, in Cavell’s terms, to get the central pair ‘back together, together again’ through their remembering and recapturing of what it is that they originally loved about their spouse; a quality that has been temporarily lost. In Dorothy the central couple squabble but at times are reminded of their mutual love. In one scene Dorothy dissolves into tears and proclaims, ‘I don’t want the baby, I hate babies’. Tony makes her laugh and the scene ends with them working together to revise one of his musical scores, suggesting that their marriage is grounded in a companionship which, although threatened, has the potential to be recovered. Although the film doesn’t engage in a sophisticated debate about the nature of marriage, as in classics of the genre such as Adam’s Rib,59 it does engage with debates about marriage and specifically divorce that were topical to 1950s Britain. Comic tension is added to the film by confusion over which woman Tony is actually married to, and therefore uncertainty about which one he should realign himself with. It transpires that an error with paperwork has invalidated his divorce from Myrtle, which

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was undertaken in Bolivia. This positions him in a bigamist marriage with Dorothy and raises the spectre that the couple’s child will be illegitimate. Tony is unable to divorce Myrtle because, in accordance with English law, ‘there aren’t any grounds’ and his only hope is to persuade Myrtle to divorce him for the sake of the child. At this time, divorce by mutual consent on the basis of an irretrievable breakdown of marriage was not possible in England although supporters of divorce reform advocated on behalf of couples in committed relationships who couldn’t remarry because one of them was still locked into a ‘dead marriage’.60 A figure that dominated the social landscape of the 1950s therefore was the ‘illegal wife’, the woman who changed her name by deed poll to cohabit with a man in a respectable manner,61 and Dorothy finds herself inadvertently in this situation. The film thus dramatizes in a comedic manner various law-breaking activities such as bigamy and sex and pregnancy outside marriage, which were topical subjects in the 1950s and would have resonated with audiences. The situation is ultimately resolved by Tony’s marriage to Myrtle in Tonga (‘one of the friendly islands … it sure was friendly’) eventually being proven as invalid, but for Dorothy and Tony the prospect of losing the other – Tony to Myrtle, and Dorothy to her huffily reclaimed single status (‘you may call me Miss Hetherington!’) – is both the cause of marital strife and the means by which the couple’s mutual love and affection is re-ignited. Tony, like his namesake in Raising a Riot, assumes the role of the woman within the family setting by acting as parent (mother) to his bed-ridden wife whilst undertaking all aspects of domestic work and home-making. The film’s opening shot depicts a country cottage complete with white picket fence and ducks waddling serenely down the lane, but this rural idyll is quickly shown to be a myth and the opening functions as an ironic comment on contemporary married life. Inside the cottage the domestic space is shown to be a mess with washing hanging from an indoor line and the room littered with a random assortment of papers and piles of books. The advertisers dream of the modern, efficient and streamlined home is again replaced by a ‘realistic’ chaotic living space and the drudgery of routine tasks. The action is primarily confined to the domestic setting, principally the living-room and bedroom where Dorothy lies marooned in bed. The setting is, in common with other comedies of remarriage, ‘emphatically at home at home’62 and provides a prolonged look at intimate and usually private domestic settings such as the bedroom.

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8. John Gregson consoles Peggy Cummins in To Dorothy a Son (1954)

Tony’s experience of this space is deeply problematic; he bumps his head on the low beams, trips over his wife’s suitcases and searches hopelessly for a ringing telephone lost in a pile of newspapers. His repeated stumbling and falling about the domestic terrain is symptomatic of the impending gender trouble. Once again the man takes the role of the ‘ordinary housewife’ running the family home without any form of domestic help, but there is no attempt to impose a rationalist project of order and discipline on proceedings or even particularly to show him failing or succeeding at domestic tasks. A beleaguered Tony merely survives, responding to dramas as they arise. His wife’s demands for tea, toast, her novel and an explanation as to why he divorced his first wife, as well as visits by the district nurse must be accommodated, whilst the demands of the bank manager are held at bay with fanciful explanations of an imminent salary deposit. He is shown to have readily absorbed aspects of female identity. Dorothy’s bed-bound status positions Tony as a mother caring for a sick child, whilst the arrival on the scene of Myrtle brings tears and tantrums from Dorothy which requires Tony to soothe her like a difficult child. In a manner similar to Raising a Riot and the comedy of role reversal, the male undertaking of mundane domestic activity ‘defamiliarizes’ that

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activity and makes the invisible work of the housewife visible. In one extended scene Tony attempts to iron socks, pushes the vacuum-cleaner around the living-room in a desultory manner and flicks a feather duster at the ornaments. Domestic activity is augmented once again by the use of clothing in the process of feminizing the male character. The obligatory frilly pinny is worn whilst ironing and vacuuming, and absent-mindedly holding the feather duster close to his face whilst talking on the telephone softens Tony’s masculine features. Removing an array of his wife’s frilly, feminine nighties from the internal washingline provides a further opportunity for male transvestism. One nightie gets caught on his head, its lace framing his face whilst Myrtle, holding up another in front of him, creates the overall impression of Tony as a bride, decked out in full wedding gown regalia. It is less the case here that through clothing the male character is transformed and educated about the feminine (as in Riot where the male is shown to have something to learn); rather it is deployed here as a standard humorous device intended to portray Tony as an already feminized male and the quintessential ‘hen-pecked’ husband (the scenes occur in the first half of the film).63 Even when the character assumes a more typically ‘masculine’ role – the expectant father-to-be, the object of Myrtle’s romantic affections – his masculinity is marked by nervousness and anxiety. Myrtle’s voluptuousness frightens him whilst Dorothy’s (false) labour sends him into a blind panic. Casting is important here, with Gregson’s solid and dependable persona marking him out as an ‘Everyman’ type: ordinary, stoical, capable.64 On the one hand Gregson’s unassuming persona engenders a degree of malleability that makes him receptive to feminine qualities, whilst his Everyman status can be used to suggest a degree of dissatisfaction with the mainstream male. This sense of frustration with contemporary gender roles is compounded when we consider how the women are portrayed. Dorothy and Myrtle represent opposite ends of a spectrum of femininity; the seemingly doting wife tied to domesticity, and the sex object who earns her living as a show-girl. Dorothy is, in her husband’s words, ‘warm, clinging, cuddlesome and sweet’, her alignment with woman’s maternal and domestic role represented by her confinement both physically and psychologically to the family home and the bedroom. She is played by Peggy Cummins, whose ingénue characteristics were often enlivened by a degree of insolence and sensuality, and which are put to good effect in this film where her sweetness is balanced by a short temper, biting tongue and demanding nature. She is thus convincing both as the ‘virtuous … homemaker’

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of Harper’s description65 and as an equal combatant to her American competitor. In contrast Myrtle is loud, brassy and pneumatic. Introduced performing at an audition where she lustily sings, ‘Give me a man, any kind of a man’, the character is the embodiment of narrative trouble. Strongly Americanized (within a British context) she signifies overt sexuality, consumption and material excess. Whilst Dorothy’s pregnant figure is hidden under bedclothes, Myrtle’s is displayed via a number of tight-fitting outfits which emphasize her voluptuous hourglass figure. UK passport control categorize her visit to the country as one of ‘pleasure’, and upon learning of her inheritance she immediately purchases two mink coats (‘I’ll have one of each … the light one and the dark one’) which come to parallel Dorothy’s two babies. Each woman embodies an extreme of femininity – sex object/wife and mother – cultural types which, in the hands of Muriel Box, are deployed in an ironic and knowing manner. The failure to reconcile these two aspects of womanhood (positioned here as contradictory) into one figure suggests, as Geraghty has argued,66 the difficulty in holding together in any prolonged or coherent manner the different discourses that made up the ‘New Woman’ of the 1950s. But these extremes can also be read as Muriel Box’s feminist commentary on the poverty of contemporary gender relations and their cultural constructions within the mainstream popular media, where female identity was too readily imagined within a Madonna/whore dichotomy and normative hetero-femininity assumed priority. Muriel Box’s diaries record her frustration that the misogynist aspects of Peter Roger’s script for Dorothy (‘men were made to wear the pants and pants were made to carry the dough’) were widely endorsed by male laughter at screening previews.67 Dorothy’s description of the jacket cover of her missing crime novel – ‘it has a woman lying across a bed with a dagger sticking in her bosom’ – encapsulates the film’s dual image of womanhood, the bed-bound Dorothy and the pneumatic Myrtle, and suggests that within this film-maker’s mind at least was the desire to kill off both kinds of woman. The narrative culminates in the safe delivery of Dorothy’s babies and the equitable distribution of the inheritance, bringing to an end the inversion of gender roles. The reconciliation of the estranged couple and the banishment of narrative trouble in the form of Myrtle ensures Dorothy can assume her proper role as wife and mother, whilst the money means that Tony need no longer work from home. The tribulations of law-breaking (vis-à-vis personal relationships), feminized males and the acerbic critique of roles for women suggests that, in Box’s film at least, there is not so much a respect for the feminine

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but a frustration with contemporary gender roles. In Young Wives’ Tale the consequence and difficulty of living in accordance with dominant cultural norms of femininity is further exposed and interrogated. Young Wives’ Tale Young Wives’ Tale (1951) is adapted from a successful West End play and is, of the three films discussed in this chapter, the most thorough and complex in its interrogation of marriage and gender roles. The film’s producer, Victor Skutezky, produced a number of films in the 1950s that incorporated a degree of gender radicalism relative to the mainstream (The Weak and the Wicked is one other example, discussed in Chapter Four), and he frequently employed the scriptwriter Anne Burnaby, whose approach to gender relations harmonized with Skutezky’s outlook. Burnaby had a reputation as an excellent writer and was remembered by the director J. Lee Thompson as sexually ambiguous,68 with the capacity to take an outsider’s view of mainstream culture. Whilst it is tempting to attribute the film’s protofeminist stance to its female scriptwriter, caution must be exercised as Burnaby’s adaptation is very close to the original screenplay, written by the playwright Ronald Jeans. However, it may be the case that Burnaby, who had a reputation for defending her professional opinion, negotiated sufficient creative space to retain in her script those elements of the play that were most challenging in relation to gender (the wry radio voiceover that closes the film, the extended exchanges between the husbands and wives where gender roles within marriage are debated). Certainly the production company, Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC), was renowned for prioritizing screenplay over all other aspects of production,69 and the relative lack of visual style in relation to camera-work both betrays the theatrical origins of Young Wives’ Tale and affords the script a dominant discursive position. This provides some suggestive evidence for attributing an element of creative agency to Anne Burnaby. Young Wives’ Tale centres on two middle-class couples, each with a small child, who share a house due to the post-war housing shortage: Rodney and Sabina Pennant (Nigel Patrick and Joan Greenwood) and Mary and Bruce Banning (Helen Cherry and Derek Farr). Mary and Sabina represent differing versions of femininity. Mary is an organized and efficient career woman whilst Sabina is a chaotic, hopeless housewife. Both husbands are frustrated with the personalities of their

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respective wives and wish the wives would change. Bruce thinks of Mary as a ‘cold-blooded fish’ who should stay at home with their child, whilst Rodney wishes Sabina would concentrate harder to improve her domestic skills. Their homes, and by extension their marriages, are chaotic and difficult: the children cry, cooking is piecemeal, the couples argue and domestic help is troublesome. Disruption occurs when the couples’ bickering results in the nanny giving notice and the couples briefly swap partners – a narrative device intended to arouse sexual jealousy and competition. Equilibrium is tentatively restored when the couples are reconciled, but the film ends with a return to domestic chaos as the children flood the house and the neighbour’s dog steals the Sunday roast. The couples’ status as well-established partners with young children indicates that the honeymoon stages of their relationships are over and the film focuses on their struggle with the mundane demands of domesticity and spousal familiarity. In a manner comparable with To Dorothy a Son, the couples are ‘out of step’ and need to get ‘back together, together again’, making the required move from antagonism to embrace and in the process accepting change. These conventions of genre are shaped by two topical social concerns: the post-war housing shortage which placed affordable housing at a premium, and the lack of servants. Rodney and Sabina are dependent on the generosity of their friends and are struggling to ‘make do’ with only one room to call their own whilst they share the remaining domestic space with the Banning family, the live-in nanny and a third lodger, Eve (played by Audrey Hepburn in an early film role). Rodney’s statement of ‘you call this living, it’s impossible’ would have resonated with audiences experiencing post-war austerity and similar cramped living conditions.70 In addition to the housing problem, the two couples struggle to run the home with erratic domestic support and in this respect dramatize what was the common experience of middle-class families in the 1950s. Tangential to my main argument about the married couples but interesting nevertheless, the nanny employed to look after Mary’s child71 occupies an ambivalent position in the household. On the one hand she is portrayed as holding a position of supreme power over her employers, who are forced to treat her solicitously for fear of losing her. The wives in particular are deferential as they (especially Mary) have the most to lose, with the burden of childcare defaulting to them if she leaves. Conversely the couples also resent the dependency and loss of freedom that accompanies live-in, paid help. Arguments, disagreements and misunderstandings over the behaviour of both the

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children and the adults culminate in one nanny being harangued as a ‘shapeless, snooping, sanctimonious old bag’ whilst another is criticized for having ‘a very peculiar face’. Whilst the comic mode provides a legitimate space for trading insults there is an underlying viciousness to these expressions that suggests middle-class anxiety and simmering resentment about their ‘dependency’ on paid help where the balance of power has – to their mind – finally shifted in favour of the supplier. Dramatic interest is predicated on doubling between the two female characters whose representation is based on a dualism between the emotional artist and the rational scientist. Sabina was an actress who gave up her career to take up the role of housewife and mother. Her scatty and melodramatic personality is represented by a performance style based on exaggerated and expressive gestures, a ‘flamboyance’ which is mirrored in her erratic approach to housekeeping. Overly demonstrative and romantic, she enjoys male attention, stimulates her husband’s jealousy and picks fights with him to inject some ‘high drama’ into their mundane (i.e. ordinary) married life. Typically dressed in the outfit of the ‘harassed housewife’, that is, a random assortment of prosaic blouses and cardigans, supplemented by a teatowel draped casually over one shoulder, she appears on occasion in glamorous evening gowns which establish her overtly feminine nature. The characterization is enhanced by the casting of Joan Greenwood, whose seductive persona in comic roles was established by her ‘Sibella’ in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). Her husband Rodney frequently and loudly expresses his dissatisfaction with his wife’s home-management skills which he characterizes as inefficient and disorganized and which he attributes to his wife’s ‘fluffy mind.’ In contrast, Mary works outside the home holding a senior position in a chemical laboratory; a post she prefers to that of fulltime mother. She is both literally and figuratively a scientist. Played by Helen Cherry, an actress commonly described as ‘serene’,72 this quality of stillness consolidates Mary’s characterization. The epitome of the 1950s modern woman combining the ‘dual roles’ of career and motherhood, her efficient and controlled nature is signalled by her neat-fitting tailored suits, her refusal to be emotionally demonstrative and the lack of variety in her bodily movements, which are always purposeful and direct. She displays no interest in arguing with her husband, preferring instead rational discussion, and she is both amused and frustrated by Sabina’s tears and tantrums. Mary’s appropriation of attributes commonly associated with masculinity – emotional restraint, non-maternal nature, rationality – is highly challenging both

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to her husband and to ideals of ‘feminine’ femininity. An infuriated Bruce disparagingly describes her as ‘the perfect machine at work’ and instead desires a ‘hearty buxom wife’, a stay-at-home mother to his six children ‘who’d adore me and the children’; an image Mary describes as ‘revolting’. For this reason he admires Sabina, whom he describes as a ‘thoroughly feminine wife’ and considers ‘courageous for taking on a job she hated’ – that of ‘real wife’ and mother. Bruce clearly wishes that Mary possessed Sabina’s emotional and demonstrative characteristics, whilst Rodney’s wishes Sabina had Mary’s organizational skills. Both couples are out of alignment and part of the work of the narrative is to effect a change. This is achieved by Sabina seducing Bruce, which provokes jealousy in their respective partners. Rodney learns to be more sympathetic towards Sabina and tolerate her domestic inadequacies, Sabina’s desire for high drama and romantic reconciliation is sated, and Bruce’s expectations of emotional femininity are satisfied by Mary’s tearful confession of feminine possessiveness towards her husband. In the process of moving towards this seemingly neat resolution necessary for narrative closure, marriage is debated and male hubris in relation to housework and the home is held up for ridicule. The women express opposing beliefs about the concept of marriage: Mary is pragmatic while Sabina is romantic, and both struggle to find equality within their marriages. Following a row with Rodney the women discuss their domestic situation. Sabina considers it ‘terribly important to keep the romantic side alive’ and gloomily questions whether ‘the romance in marriage can survive the sort of life we lead?’ Mary’s responses are typically pragmatic: ‘Personally I never deluded myself you could take romance into marriage. Wings are to fly with – not to walk with’, and suggests to Sabina that she should learn that ‘you can’t live forever on a diet of wedding cake’. The women’s views, although opposing, both express a similar concern over the difficulty of finding space within marriage for romance. Sabina creates it artificially through seduction and jealous intrigue, whilst Mary, for whatever reason, has no expectations of it. Notwithstanding these abstract ruminations about romance and marriage, the women are faced with more immediate and pressing concerns regarding housework and childcare. Rodney and Sabina’s marriage is predicated on the paradigm of different but equal; Rodney earns money as a writer, Sabina looks after the home and children. Rodney, who works from home, defends himself from Sabina’s accusations of his occasional shiftlessness, indignantly proclaiming, ‘I work every day’. Sabina challenges his belief that his role is equivalent to hers, exclaiming ‘Not like I do,

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if you don’t feel like writing you don’t write, how would you feel if I said to you “there’s no dinner, I didn’t feel like cooking?”’ For Sabina at least, their roles in marriage are certainly different and are intended to be complementary, but they fall short in terms of equality. The housewife’s life of drudgery remains shaped by the demands of routine and mundane tasks – elements that Judy Giles terms ‘the rough of household maintenance’ – and the promise of the ‘attractive career’ of creative homemaking has yet to be delivered.73 In marriage Sabina feels she has drawn the short straw relative to her husband. Mary and Bruce’s marriage directly challenges the paradigm of different but equal through Mary’s ‘masculine’ character and her work outside the home. Narrative space is given over to Bruce’s open criticisms of Mary: ‘you might prefer looking after your own child to working in a chemical laboratory’. He chastises her for not immediately checking on their child after work, complaining that ‘she might be dead for all you know’. But space is equally provided for Mary to respond to his criticisms, and she reminds him of their pre-marriage agreement that he wouldn’t interfere with her career. Bruce’s implicit criticism of her as a negligent mother evokes the flippant response of ‘don’t be silly, nanny would have told me’. Whilst this confirms Bruce’s opinion of Mary as ‘unnatural’ the joke is not at her expense but his, used to highlight his ‘fussy’ and overly anxious nature. The film is not so radical as to suggest that the husband has an obligation for full-time childcare. It is accepted by all, including Mary, that responsibility for their child ultimately lies with Mary – who at one point agrees to give up her career if a suitable nanny cannot be found. But within this accepted framework the point is also made that the gendered division of labour favours men. Bruce’s judgement of his wife and some of his other expectations are shown to be unreasonable. Their conversation takes place in the living-room where Bruce is seated with the evening paper whilst Mary moves about the room, tidying away the detritus of children’s toys, lays the table for dinner and pours him a sherry. Her activities illustrate how women automatically assume their ‘natural’ role of wife and mother upon their return from paid work and demonstrate the gendered meanings of home: for men a space for leisure, for women a site of labour. The scene also points to the impossible and contradictory demands made of women by men; should she check on the child, pour her husband sherry or make preparations for dinner? Bruce’s position, comfortably ensconced in his favourite armchair whilst Mary works around him, undermines his argument and indicates his shortcomings within the marriage.

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Similarly, Rodney’s assessment of his wife Sabina demonstrates a very particular and masculinist understanding of housework. Rodney sits typing at a table whilst Sabina is occupied with multiple tasks: bringing in washing from the garden, going upstairs to attend to their child and working at an ironing-board in the living-room. Sabina’s constant movement through the domestic space ‘interrupts’ Rodney’s creative work, leading him to explode ‘I can’t concentrate with you flitting in and out all the time!’ For Rodney, Sabina’s ‘flitting’ is evidence of a specifically female incompetence. He treats her with a mixture of exasperation and paternal indulgence, commenting to Bruce, ‘Dear Sabina, so delightfully incompetent, a really womanly woman. She can do it when she concentrates but she can’t, she’s always wishing she was doing something else, she has a fluffy mind.’ The concept of the ‘fluffy mind’ evokes what T. E. Perkins terms the ‘flighty woman’ stereotype; that is, a woman characterized by her ‘inability to concentrate … [and her] mental flightiness, scattiness’.74 For Rodney, Sabina’s bodily flitting and mental fluffiness are grounded in biology and her ‘womanly womanness’. Rodney advocates that she adopt a more linear approach to housework, concentrating on one task at a time and following it through to its logical conclusion to bring routine and order to the household; a distinctly ‘modern’ and 1950s approach to running the ‘efficient’ home. Mary articulates similar ‘masculinist’ views, commenting on Sabina’s ‘wasted energy’ in respect of housework and implicitly linking this to her excessively emotional nature. On the one hand Rodney wants Sabina to be more organized and efficient whilst on the other hand her (feminine) incompetence is to be both expected and welcomed as it affords him a position of superiority. Sabina’s mental flightiness is consistent with what Perkins describes as ‘a mode of thinking which is essential to the housewife’s job … [where] the capacity to keep shifting attention back and forth, and changing skills, is characteristic’.75 It is not the case that Sabina ‘flits’ (to use Rodney’s pejorative label) and fails to concentrate as defined within a rationalist discourse, but rather she responds (as Tony learns to do in Riot) to household tasks as they arise. The ironing is necessarily abandoned when the baby cries because children’s needs, not Woman’s, are irrational and unpredictable. Rodney’s misreading of Sabina’s actions as ‘flightiness’ and his position of smug paternal sufferance is challenged by the considerable amount of time given over to undermining the men and deriving humour at their expense. There are marked gender differences in how women and men negotiate the domestic space. All the rooms are chaotic and disorganized, strewn

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with ironing-boards, children’s toys, piles of washing and precariously balanced drying-racks. The men experience the domestic space as extremely problematic and constantly bump into or trip over domestic artefacts. A fall over a discarded toy causes Rodney to scatter his pile of manuscripts, the children smear Bruce’s bowler hat with jam and he tumbles down the stairs at the end of the film. As I’ve suggested earlier, accidents in the comedy genre function, as Babington and Evans argue, at a dual level as ‘[o]nce attached to the realms of the mind … the basic pratfall is modified … by the creative potential of symbolism and symptomology’.76 On one level the accidents and falls experienced by the men are intended to humiliate them and make them look silly, and to illustrate the price to be paid for male hubris. Their pompous and imperious declarations of female incompetence and scattiness, their belief that their wives are either ‘fluffy’ or ‘unfeeling’, are punctured by their inability to adequately negotiate domestic space. Bruce’s outmoded and reactionary masculinity and Rodney’s imperious affectation of weary paternal indulgence are in need of correction in relation to revised, contemporary notions of gender and marriage. There is a sense that their pratfalls are also readable at the level of symptomology, suggestive of their own desire to embrace change and move beyond socially restrictive norms of masculinity. If, as Babington and Evans have argued in their discussion of screwball comedies, ‘accidents are the signs of an unconscious demanding liberation’77 then in Young Wives’ Tale the men’s falls not only humiliate them and undermine their assessment of the domestic situation, but suggest their own unconscious desire to break free from gender roles where normative masculinity is predicated on a desire for a buxom wife and six children. That the men are at fault is indicated by the women’s negotiation of the domestic space which is, in contrast to the men, skilful. Mary moves seamlessly through the domestic space, in one scene calmly tidying toys and pouring sherry, in another rolling pastry whilst simultaneously smoking a cigarette. Discarded toys present no hazard to her because, unlike the men, she notices them. Sabina’s movements are different but are no less skilful; leaping, but never falling, around and over objects in the room, ducking under a standard lamp and vaulting over a chaise longue to rescue a burning meal or attend a crying child. Neither of the women are subjected to the mishaps that befall the men. In this respect the film departs from the conventions of screwball comedy where typically both male and female protagonists are portrayed as accident-prone; women’s falls, like those of men, have literal and symbolic meaning.78 Indeed, it is the very absence of visual

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gags at the expense of women that marks this film as strikingly different from other better-known examples of the comedy-of-marriage genre, particularly Genevieve which is often held as the paradigmatic case. As I have previously noted, Geraghty finds in this film that the women have to sacrifice more to bring their views in line with the men and ‘pay for their aloofness by being made to look childish and immature’,79 a punishment for their hubris. Such tribulations are not visited on either Sabina or Mary who, in being spared the humiliations that are directed instead towards the men, are afforded a considerable degree of dignity. Utilizing Schatz’s framework, where reconciliation is achieved through character change, it is Rodney and Mary in Young Wives’ Tale who have to modify their stance. Rodney admits ‘I don’t want a housekeeper and nothing else’, and he and Sabina companionably peel potatoes together, Rodney presumably having learned to love her as she is. Mary and Bruce’s reconciliation is similarly perfunctory, even though Mary’s characterization as independent and emotionally controlled is potentially more threatening to Bruce and his ideals of femininity. Bruce’s flirtation with Sabina finally results in Mary’s tears, which are welcomed by Bruce as evidence of an emotional femininity, consequently soothing his anxieties and allaying his fears of masculine usurpation. On the one hand it is clear that Mary has finally been won round to Bruce’s preference for a ‘thoroughly feminine wife’, her emotional control which had earned her the pejorative label of ‘the perfect machine’ finally softened and ‘feminized’. Her expectation that there is no place for romance in marriage has finally proven to be misguided. But the scene is ambiguous. Her emotional breakdown is extremely short-lived, comprising only a brief scene in the film’s final minutes. The scene is preceded by one where the latest nanny leaves, suggesting that Mary’s tears are as much attributable to the frustration and difficulty of retaining help essential to her career as they are to a more socially acceptable display of feminine sexual jealousy. In addition, the softening of her character through tears and emotional breakdown provides an appropriate ‘performance’ of normative femininity that satisfies her husband whilst allowing her to continue in her career. Significantly, the film does not end with the brief scene of reconciliation but rudely disrupts it by the neighbour’s dog stealing the roast and the children flooding the bathroom, whilst a radio voiceover solemnly declares ‘the country can never repay the debt it owes to the British housewife’. In film, attempts at narrative closure frequently meet with resistance or remain (as they do in this film) unconvincing,

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as the resolutions that are offered are unequal to containing the conflicts that have been unleashed through the comic form. In sum, Bruce’s prolonged punishment for his reactionary masculinity is more memorable than Mary’s tears. Whilst it would be stretching the point to consider the film an overtly radical text in its gender politics, one doesn’t have to read too hard against the grain to see a considerable proto-feminist sub-text at work. It seems there wasn’t an enthusiastic audience for the film’s protofeminist declarations. It received a positive review in Picture Show, which classified it as a ‘thoroughly amusing domestic farce’ and singled out for special notice the performances of Nigel Patrick and Joan Greenwood, both extremely popular actors at this time.80 For Monthly Film Bulletin it was ‘an agreeable comedy in the tradition of adapted plays of the “Quiet Weekend” variety’.81 Despite being seemingly positioned to enjoy reasonable commercial success the film didn’t fare well at the British box office.82 One might speculate that whilst the script is well written and the dialogue sharp, its gender politics were out of step with contemporary consciousness, perhaps expressing too early, in 1951, the failure of housewifery to deliver on the promise of a creative career for women. Furthermore its theatrical setting appears dated and somewhat staid compared with the more effervescent Genevieve, which enjoyed such success two years later. Conclusion All three films share a common concern with contemporary roles for women and gender relations within marriage. Across the board there is a tendency to point out how difficult the role of housewife and mother is, but the films stop short of suggesting that men should take an equal and on-going share of the burden, pointing instead to more socially acceptable ‘corner-cutting’ solutions such as tinned food or learning to accept a degree of domestic chaos. Toye’s film, and her work more generally, is marked by a good-humoured tolerance of existing sexual politics and gender difference which contrasts sharply with Muriel Box’s approach, which is predicated on a more overtly feminist stance towards ‘positive representations’ of women. Box’s outlook in this respect has much in common with the film critics Catherine de la Roche and E. Arnot Robertson, the subjects of Chapter Six. The doting wife/sex object dualism found in To Dorothy a Son suggests something of Box’s frustration with what she saw as mainstream cinema’s inability to think

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beyond those roles and the barriers she encountered to her attempts to portray a more rounded and complex womanhood. She found later success with Simon and Laura (1955), which continued the theme of the estranged warring couple, although here the sexual politics were more even and balanced: a factor achieved, in part, through the judicious casting of Kay Kendall and Peter Finch who were well matched as leads.83 Anne Burnaby continued to work in a comic vein and her script for Operation Bullshine (1959), one of the popular ‘service comedies’ of the decade, evidences her preference for irony as a political weapon by satirizing the notion of the female army recruit as the biddable helpmeet of the male. The female recruits are hedonistic and disobedient, drive their male commander to distraction, confound expectations that they will ‘naturally’ submit to discipline (an assumption predicated on a reading of female nature as biddable and submissive) and refuse to undertake domestic tasks like peeling potatoes because, as one female recruit complains, ‘I joined the army to get away from that kind of thing’. In the three films discussed at length in this chapter a (male) figure is constantly thwarted in his attempts at undertaking creative work within a domestic environment and the point is made loudly and clearly that domesticity is the death-knell of a particular type of artistic creativity.84 This figure can be read as a surrogate for these female artists (Box, Toye, Burnaby) who had to keep the domestic realm at arm’s length if they were to succeed professionally within the realm of film production.85 That all three worked successfully in comedy and at times marriage comedy establishes that the genre’s approach to sexual politics (a space where ‘gender trouble’ could be given rein) was sufficiently broad to accommodate their own different outlooks on the subject. The comedies-of-marriage discussed in this chapter provided a space where the male could be educated and brought round to a respect for the feminine, and where the conventions of heterosexual relations could at times, and within given limits, be interrogated, tested and exposed as predicated on an unequal division of labour. The genre’s capacity for a freer expression of tensions vis-à-vis gender roles is greater than has been widely realized and films such as Raising a Riot, To Dorothy a Son and Young Wives’ Tale need to be set alongside better-known examples to present a more rounded picture of how British comedy approached the subject of women, men and marriage.

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4

The Female Group Film In 1989 the actress Virginia McKenna recalled her experience of working on the 1956 British film A Town Like Alice as one of the most positive experiences of her career, delighting in a film which offered ‘a cast full of marvellous actresses’ substantial female roles at a time when they were in short supply in mainstream cinema.1 This film is unusual because the narrative centres on a small group of women of different ages and with different life experience, drawn together as a result of extreme circumstances. As the story unfolds the women’s relationships with one another assume priority in contrast to those they have with men, which are comparatively small-scale. Films that focus on groups of women are relatively rare in mainstream cinema. How might we account for this scarcity? Certainly patriarchal structures play a part, requiring women to be individualized: that is, disconnected from other women, with their social embeddedness deriving from heterosexual processes that position them in relation to individual men and the family (via heterosexual, monogamous marriage). Popular film can play a role in this process. Classic narrative cinema typically prioritizes a (male) hero/protagonist on whom narrative interest can centre. Hollywood’s star system favours star vehicles, which clearly work against group dynamics. As Yvonne Tasker has argued, ‘glamorous stars … in spectacular isolation’ are the norm in Hollywood, particularly for female stars, a strategy that has effectively led to representations of female friendship being marginalized.2 For Jeanine Basinger ‘[t] he notion of a group of women working together is a film rarity’ as ‘[s]isterhood is not common’ in mainstream narrative cinema.3 The dominant representation of women as, in Basinger’s terms, ‘petty rivals’ clearly fulfils patriarchy’s requirement for individualization. Where women in groups do appear in mainstream cinema they seem to do so under particular social circumstances. William Wellman’s Westward the Women (1951), for example, which follows a group of Chicago women travelling to California to meet prospective husbands, highlights female solidarity and independence and concludes with the women’s right to enter into marriage on absolutely equal terms with men. Despite its nineteenth-century setting the film is clearly a

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response to changes in the way that ‘the family’ was understood in American society in the post-war period.4 Within a British context the Second World War gave rise to a crisis in gender roles, with women increasingly replacing men in the workforce. British cinema produced a number of female group films during this period of ‘crisis’: Millions Like Us and The Gentle Sex (both 1943), 2,000 Women (1944) and Great Day (1945). These films responded very directly to the reality of female conscription, internment and the demands of a femaledominated Home Front. Given the relative rarity of what might be termed ‘the female group film’, and the fact that it emerges under particular circumstances and the negative pull of patriarchal structures, the question arises: how does popular film represent groups of women, and how does it do this at a particular point in time? This chapter will explore these questions through a case study of two popular British group films from the 1950s: A Town Like Alice (d. Jack Lee 1956) and The Weak and the Wicked (d. J. Lee Thompson 1954). The presence of these and other female group films in the decade has to be accounted for when official discourses were addressing women as wives and mothers and positioning them in relation to husbands within a companionate marriage that ostensibly allowed little space for female friendships to flourish. To what extent does the female group film suggest that there was some social unease vis-à-vis gender roles and femininity at this time? Both films were commercially profitable, achieving box office success at a time when British cinema was struggling to respond to both rapid social change and declining cinema audiences. Their popularity allows me to speculate on the appeal these films may have had for female cinema-goers. There are points of connection between films which deal with groups of women and the ‘woman’s film’. For Maria LaPlace the latter is ‘distinguished by its female protagonist, female point of view and its … [engagement with the] traditional realism of women’s experience  … love, emotion and relationships’, and it allocates a prominent place to ‘relationships between women’.5 Certainly these are all elements that are readily applicable to the female group film which is populated by female characters and where events are presented from a female perspective. On closer inspection, however, the two are not exactly synonymous. The idea of a solo protagonist, which gives the woman’s film its individualistic slant, would appear to be antithetical to the premise of the group film. Further, to what extent is the ‘traditional realism’ of women’s experience shaped or extended by the particular social circumstances that gave rise to the female group in the first place?

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A film such as The Gentle Sex, which emerged during the crisis of war, is less concerned with depicting ‘love, emotion and relationships’ than the rigours of military training as experienced by a group of female conscripts. In this respect it seems likely that films that deal with groups of women have an affinity with, but are not reducible to, the ‘woman’s film’, and I aim to tease out some of the differences in my subsequent analysis. Within the British context, domestic cinema has proven rather more hospitable to the female group film than Hollywood. In part this can be explained by the tradition of ensemble-playing in British cinema. Britain’s lack of a star system (relative to Hollywood) and the close relationship between theatre and cinema has meant that ensemble pieces have historically been a mainstay of indigenous film production – a vehicle for showcasing the breadth of Britain’s ‘great acting’ talent.6 Although typically this has favoured men (the war genre is the most obvious example of a prolific type of group film with a male ensemble cast), women occasionally benefit from the tradition and rather more space is found in British cinema for groups of women. Films such as She’ll Be Wearing Pink Pyjamas (1985) and Bhaji on the Beach (1993) are examples of more contemporary instances of the female ensemble film that emerged in response to the particular social circumstances of, respectively, second wave feminism and multi-culturalism. In this respect a case can be made for the female group film as a type of ‘woman’s film’ that finds particular expression in mainstream British cinema. In this chapter I will provide an overview of British female group films in the period of the 1950s. Although space precludes a detailed discussion of many films, I will articulate some of the diversity of the theme as it appeared in this period. I will then look in some detail at two popular British films: A Town Like Alice and The Weak and the Wicked. In both films the female group is fundamentally central to the narrative, and I will explore how the films exemplify, in very different ways, some of the possibilities and limitations of female communities and female relations as they are imagined in British cinema at this time. The Female Group Film in 1950s British Cinema The female group film had enjoyed some popular success in the 1940s and continued to find a space in a 1950s cultural landscape dominated by social-problem films and the genres of war and comedy. In the

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comedy genre, the ‘St Trinian’s’ series dramatized the machinations of a large group of women. Inaugurated by the success of The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950) – where a girls’ school is forcibly billeted at a boys’ public school, leading to a classic ‘battle of the sexes’ scenario – subsequent St Trinian’s films (The Belles of, 1954; Blue Murder at, 1958) focused on the spectacle of the destructive female group. Schoolgirls both young and old band together to challenge any and every established social order (the police, the education system and the army) and the films are a celebration of unruly womanhood that mirrors in a comic mode the female non-compliance found in the ‘man-made woman’ films discussed in Chapter One. At the end of the decade it was service comedies like Operation Bullshine (1959, discussed in Chapter Three) and Petticoat Pirates (1961) that continued the comedic treatment of sexual politics, although here placed in a quasi-war setting. In the 1950s, and outside of the comedic framework, the ‘realist’ war film previously hospitable to the theme of the female group reverted to portraying male homosocial relations. Innumerable ‘prisoner-of-war’ and ‘special mission’ films (The Colditz Story and The Dam Busters, both 1955) dramatized the male group operating within a crisis situation with women invariably absent from these narratives. In part this can be explained by the shift in the types of war films being made. In the 1940s, female communities were a regular feature of the ‘Home Front’ film, but this type of war film disappeared in the 1950s to be replaced with tales of either individual heroism or the heroics of a small elite group.7 Women’s contribution to the war effort, where it was told at all, typically focused on the true stories of a small, select number of ‘special women’ such as female resistance fighters operating as solo agents (see Odette, 1950 and Carve Her Name With Pride, 1958). A Town Like Alice portrays the travails of a group of civilian women stranded in Malaya after the Japanese invasion and is atypical as the only all-female group war film of the decade. Critical discussion of the film has focused on it either as an example of the British war in the East or as a star study of the ‘central’ female character played by Virginia McKenna.8 Although insightful, both approaches fail to address the subject of women in groups. Of the three core genres of the 1950s it was the social-problem film, with its focus on ‘topical social issues within a cinematic form’, that proved to be most hospitable to the theme of the female group.9 One strand of the genre readily engaged with ‘crisis’ scenarios or ‘extreme circumstances’ – typically prison or girls’ reformatory – and these provided a ‘natural’ setting for female group dynamics. Films such as

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The Weak and the Wicked, Good Time Girl (1948), Yield to the Night (1956) and Turn the Key Softly (1953) dramatized female relationships against a backdrop of incarceration, foregrounding the connections and differences between women and providing a space where anxieties about female desire and agency could be confronted and worked through. Another cycle within the genre were films which responded to the changing social reality of contemporary Britain in the 1950s, specifically the increase in state interventionism and a growing interest in public institutions such as the new NHS, the burgeoning social services and the police force. Concerns about child welfare in the decade extended the reach of the state into the private realm and opened up professions within the welfare state to women, who were increasingly employed as social workers, teachers and in other ‘caring’ capacities.10 Films dramatizing the ‘career woman’ taking one of a number of gendered pathways into work ranged from the social worker in I Believe in You (1952), to the student nurse and trainee doctor at the centre of the NHS drama No Times for Tears (1957). I want to pause here to consider Street Corner (1953), which focuses on the experiences of women police constables and offers a critique of the ‘separate and equal’ philosophy so prominent in official prescriptions of women’s lives in the decade. Street Corner was directed by Muriel Box and co-scripted by Muriel and her then husband, film producer Sidney Box. Muriel’s feminist sensibility evident in To Dorothy a Son (discussed in Chapter Three) likewise shaped the production of Street Corner. Both Boxes were socially committed and driven by a desire to produce popular films which were ‘topical’ in their commentary on contemporary British life, although for Muriel this commitment to topicality extended to producing ‘positive representations’ of women.11 Street Corner focuses on the professional and personal experiences of four female police officers: widowed WPC Susan (Anne Crawford), whose husband and child died in a car accident, young recruit Harrington, Sergeant Ramsey (Rosamund John) and CID Officer Miss Landow. Across this small group the women are broadly middle class but are differentiated by age, experience and personality. Harrington is young and quick to judge (‘I’ve no sympathy with mothers who can’t look after their children’) whilst Susan is older, widowed and more contemplative. The Sergeant is pragmatic and down-to-earth whilst the smart-suited Miss Landow is the quintessential 1950s career woman. During the course of the narrative the policewomen encounter a number of cases that they work together to resolve. Unhappy young mother Bridget (Peggy

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Cummins) has been arrested for shoplifting, whilst homeless WRAC Edna (Eleanor Summerfield) has absconded to care for her sick husband whom she has recently, and bigamously, married. In a dramatic scene Edna rescues a small boy who has fallen into a freezing river and she later receives a bravery award. Thus a number of narrative strands are drawn together and a range of femininities and female life experiences are sympathetically voiced: characteristics which are consistent with the woman’s film. Young mother Bridget has been forced into marriage through pregnancy and turns her attention to shop-lifting, nightclubs and men to alleviate the boredom of her domestic routine. Although she is ultimately reconciled to the demands of marriage and motherhood (albeit largely via the threat of imprisonment) her situation is handled with a degree of sensitivity; the restrictions of married life portrayed in a realistic and sympathetic manner. WPC Susan has heroically rescued a neglected child from an upper-storey window-ledge and later contemplates leaving the police force to adopt the child. She confides to Sergeant Ramsey her concerns that she might do more good in the role of mother than constable. In this scene narrative space is briefly given to articulate woman’s ‘natural’ role, although this isn’t worked through in any sustained manner. Any consideration of the tensions between women’s public and private roles is cut short by the Sergeant’s curt dismissal of Susan’s plan (‘You know you don’t mean that’), which closes the scene. In some respects Susan’s prevarications have the status of a token gesture towards the belief that professional women in the 1950s are supposed to ponder the tension between public and private roles.12 The Sergeant’s dismissal, together with Susan’s ready acceptance of it, indicates that both recognize that the contribution they make to the police force shouldn’t be rejected to accommodate ideas about women’s traditional social roles. In some respects the film does employ a ‘separate spheres’ approach to gender. The professional woman’s involvement in the public sphere is via childcare, and their handling of cases concerning lost and neglected children aligns them with typical ‘feminine’ concerns. The presence of women in the police force is crucial as it expands police work into the private sphere through ‘legitimate and natural’ means within the logic of the decade.13 In this manner the women function as the gatekeepers of the post-war family; policing the community and ensuring it adheres to the prescribed tenets of social welfare and justice. However this post-war world of work for women is not limited to childcare but is supplemented by the women’s active involvement in

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more conventional police activities including trailing jewel thieves and plain-clothes undercover detective work. In these areas the women are shown to be brave in apprehending villains and imaginative in their detective work. It is intelligence gleaned by CID Officer Landow and Sergeant Ramsey that is instrumental in arresting the male thieves, and an off-duty Harrington tackles the two fleeing thieves, wrestling one to the ground until a second overpowers her. The women’s bravery and initiative is set alongside articulations of the prejudice and hostility they face as WPCs. One prostitute proclaims she’d rather be ‘pinched’ by a man and that ‘coppers in skirts’ are ‘bad for business’ whilst the absconder Edna dismisses the women, saying ‘pity they haven’t got something better to do’. The most aggressive dismissal is voiced from within the force itself by a dour young Scottish policeman, Angus, who considers WPCs ‘unfeminine … uneconomic … flighty, impetuous, undependable, anti-social and easily led’. Whilst he is permitted space to voice such proclamations it is not the case that his views are supported within the narrative – indeed, they are constantly challenged by the women’s actions and his character is presented throughout as unreasonable. His character serves to highlight the condition of the women in the profession, who do not necessarily enjoy equality even whilst they compete with men on male-defined terms. As a group of women, the WPCs (and some of the women they encounter) bring a number of challenges to bear on conventional understandings of femininity. They appropriate ‘masculine’ traits such as physical prowess and critical thinking, and their bravery and action is evident in a number of scenes. Indeed this masculinization of the women is augmented by their physical appearance where they appear clad in uniforms of sensible flat shoes, bulky jackets and A-line skirts. Throughout the film there is a sense that these masculine elements are ‘balanced out’ by scenes that ‘re-feminize’ the women in accordance with gender norms. I have already suggested that childcare functions in a contradictory manner – sometimes feminizing the women, at other times rejected by them as a ‘natural’ role. Clothing likewise has a particular symbolic role viv-à-vis femininity and scenes of transformation demonstrate the women switching between public and private feminine identities. WPC Susan, for example, is shown in civilian clothing whilst undertaking routine enquiries whilst the demands of plain-clothes duty in a nightclub allows another WPC to leave work in a stylish, low-cut, tightly belted cocktail dress, which elicits looks of approval and envy from her female colleagues. On another occasion Harrington finishes her shift and leaves the police

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station in a well-cut dress, high heels and matching hat. The camera lingers to depict her primping her hair in the mirror, her stated off-duty ‘mission’ a visit to the hairdressers and the dressmakers. The women’s physical appearance was noted by one contemporary critic in his review, who commented that ‘they look so neat and pretty tripping – not pounding – the beat’.14 This is less a failure of verisimilitude than a careful balancing of women’s public and private roles via the female body, with uniforms carefully set against glamorous civilian clothing and attention to grooming and physical appearance. For Harrington this process is completed by her surprise romantic alignment with Angus in the closing scene. As antagonists throughout the film this coupling (borrowing from the conventions of romantic comedy) is clearly intended to heterosexualize her, but the suggestion is also that Angus needs to learn from Harrington. His extreme anti-female views, shown to be out of step with modern thinking, will be modified by his alignment with a woman whose bravery and resourcefulness has been amply demonstrated. In its portrayal of a group of professional women at work Street Corner provides a space where ‘multiple femininities’ are given equal weight and where a female perspective is privileged. The narrative focus on women and their experiences ensures that men, despite the heterosexual closure in the final scene, are never central and function primarily as a backdrop to the women’s lives. A range of concerns are aired: should women give up work to look after children?, are coppers in skirts ‘uneconomic’?, what are the restrictions of married life? The message that women can be brave and glamorous and that their entry into masculine professions will not jeopardize their femininity proved palatable to audiences as the film enjoyed brisk business at the box office.15 Whilst Street Corner’s commercial success suggests that audiences had an appetite for its dramatization of contemporary women’s lives, what audience appeal more broadly might the group film have? On one level, group films most obviously offer viewers the ‘multiple viewpoints’ that Richard Maltby argued are an inherent feature of mainstream cinema (as I discussed in more detail in the main Introduction).16 Female group films build on this by introducing multiple female characters and in doing so allow for a range of femininities to be displayed. This idea of plurality in relation to femininity resonates with Jackie Stacey’s study of post-war female spectatorship, where cinematic identifications ‘involve processes based on similarity, but also involve the productive recognition of differences between femininities’.17 One of the main

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attractions of the female group film is precisely that it extends the identificatory possibilities available to its female spectators by offering them the pleasure of recognizing both difference and similarity across the cinematic femininities on display. Interestingly, in the cases of A Town Like Alice and The Weak and the Wicked, neither film was exclusively promoted at women, thus ensuring that the capacity for multiple viewpoints was not necessarily restricted by gender. Kinematograph Weekly’s very positive review of The Weak and the Wicked described it as a ‘romantic comedy melodrama’ which, it suggests, is ‘bound to hold and intrigue the “populars” of either sex’.18 The press book for Alice outlined numerous gender-specific and gender-neutral publicity strategies. These ranged from special film previews for women’s organizations, a press search for surviving male prisoners-of-war of the Japanese, and a call for readers’ letters about ‘A wartime acquaintance they would most like to meet again’.19 Reports in Kinematograph Weekly on how some cinema managers had actually promoted the film indicates a range of ‘angles’.20 These included a foyer display of POW war souvenirs (including ‘a set of metal false teeth’ and a ‘magnificent ceremonial sword’) and a focus on female stardom through a montage display of key scenes from Virginia McKenna’s films. One manager capitalized on the recent withdrawal of Alice from the Cannes film festival due to ‘Japanese sensitivities’ and created a publicity campaign that highlighted issues of censorship and national relations. Promoting the film in these ways catered for a number of possible readings and would ensure that the widest possible audience was reached. Having outlined the presence of the female group film in the genres of comedy, war and the social-problem film, I want to concentrate the remainder of the chapter on two films whose narratives allow me to explore in greater detail the dynamics of the female group film in the 1950s. The Female Group in War-Time – A Town Like Alice The Rank production of A Town Like Alice was based on a popular novel by best-selling author Nevil Shute. It was adapted for the screen by the experienced screenwriter Bill Lipscombe and was directed by Jack Lee, whose film-making experience was grounded in the British documentary tradition. The film was a commercial and critical success, winning BAFTAs for the central couple Virginia McKenna and Peter

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Finch, with McKenna’s role voted the most popular female performance of the year in both the British trade and fan press.21 The film focuses on the story of Jean Paget (McKenna), a young English woman working as a secretary in Malaya at the time of the Japanese invasion. Told through Jean’s post-war flashback, she is shown narrowly missing out on evacuation and is stranded, together with a group of British expatriates, at a Malay river depot. The invading Japanese army promptly dispatch the men to POW camps but disposing of the women and children proves more problematic. Accompanied by Japanese guards, the female group is forced to trek through the Malay jungle in search of a camp that will accept them. Half their number die on the journey until finally, bereft of male guards, they persuade the male elders of a Malay village to accept them into their community as workers. They remain in the village for three years until the end of the war. During the women’s extended trek, Jean meets and falls in love with an Australian POW, Joe (Finch). The film returns Jean to the post-war present where she learns that Joe survived the war and she flies to Alice Springs to be reunited with him. Female Group Dynamics From the outset a cross-section of women are introduced and individuated. In the river depot scene Ebbey tries to sit on Mrs Frost’s suitcase and belittles her husband (‘don’t let people push you around’), ‘sickly’ Mrs Frith hoards her medicines, whilst Ellen flirts with a man in return for a cigarette. Different character types are thus economically signalled: conservative/upholder of ‘traditional’ British values (Mrs Frost, ‘you wouldn’t catch me bowing to a Jap’), calm and capable (Jean, Miss Horsfall), bossy (Ebbey), flighty/sexy (Ellen), neurotic/anxious (Mrs Hammond, Mrs Frith). The group comprises young, middleaged and older women; some are married, others like Jean and Ellen are single, whilst some are possibly widows or spinsters (Mrs Frost and Miss Horsfall). Miss Horsfall is defined by her profession (teacher), Ellen by her sexuality, Mrs Hammond by her children. Thus a range of feminine types are introduced, the group differentiated by age, experience, marital status and personality. An ensemble cast of British actresses are used and bring established character traits to bear on their roles. For example, Jean Anderson (Miss Horsfall) often played the strong, reliable type whilst Nora Nicholson (Mrs Frith) specialized in dotty older women. Amongst the younger actresses Virginia McKenna

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9. The Female Group in A Town Like Alice (1956)

was at this time British cinema’s ‘English Rose’; a leading star in the industry. Narrative interest is initially balanced across the seven women with Miss Horsfall marked as the leader and Jean her deputy, although as the march progresses Jean assumes the role of principal. As the women make their journey across the harsh Malay environment, supportive relationships develop across the group. When anxious young mother Mrs Hammond is struggling to cope, Ebbey takes care of her baby so she can rest. All the women, at different times, take turns in carrying the weak and sick members of the group, both motivating their exhausted peers (‘We’ll never get over the moun­ tains’, ‘Oh yes we will’ and ‘Come along my dear, try, try’) and offering consolatory embraces and compassionate smiles when the journey gets particularly tough. At various points in the narrative supportive exchanges are shown between Miss Horsfall and Jean, Jean and Mrs Frith, Mrs Frost and Ebbey, Ebbey and Miss Horsfall. Whilst never extravagant, these small-scale gestures are entirely in keeping with both the emotional tenor of the British war film and the dynamics of the group film where the dispersal of narrative interest means that such seemingly ‘minimal’ interactions hold great significance.

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Mutually supportive bonds develop between seemingly mis-matched types. Elderly Mrs Frith is a hypochondriac and initially a drain on the group’s resources, but in keeping with the conventions of the female group film she is afforded a space in the narrative. She offers Jean support as her relationship with Joe develops, comforts the younger woman following her grief when Joe is tortured and seemingly left for dead, and finally reconciles Jean to the belief that prolonged hatred of an enemy is impossible to sustain. The figure of the older woman – typically marginalized in mainstream cultural representation – has here a central role to play as a mentor, confidante and provider of emotional support. Although initially signalled as ‘dotty’ (her illnesses shown to be imaginary), she turns out to be one of the most physically and psychologically robust members of the group. In one scene a young Japanese guard moves towards a hut where the women are sheltering overnight, his movement suggesting that rape might be his intention. Mrs Frith appears at the doorway and with a curt ‘Good Night’ and a challenging gaze the captive dismisses the captor. The guiding role that Mrs Frith plays in relation to Jean is reciprocated. Jean wisely partners Mrs Frith with an orphaned child, knowing that through this relationship the older woman will learn to share and think beyond her own immediate needs. In these respects the women experience the ‘learning and growth process’ that Jeanine Basinger argues characterizes the male-group war film, although in Alice the age range is considerably broader and with the older women playing a central role in the process.22 A further difference from its male counterpart is that the women have no clear goal or specific activity such as defending an outpost or escaping incarceration. Their purpose is endurance and their goal, if successful, is to move towards incarceration in the form of a camp. As women they embody a problematic status. They are civilians rather than military personnel, prisoners but not official POWs; their ‘difference’ at the level of gender makes it difficult to incorporate them into the sociopolitical structures of an occupied territory. It is this exclusion that requires them to refocus their energies inwards and to work out how to function as a group. Although the women rely on one another, the supportive bonds are not shown as naturally occurring but achieved through negotiating conflict and dissent. Mrs Frith’s medicines are forcibly confiscated, leaving her to reprimand the group with ‘You’ll be sorry when I’m dead’, whilst a distraught mother accuses Jean of inequitable distribution of quinine when her daughter is fatally ill. On one level the film expands the traditional realism of women’s experience

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typically found in the woman’s film, through a focus on extreme prob­ lems such as starvation, death, disease and exhaustion. On another level, however, these scenarios have clear parallels to the lives British women led during wartime, duplicating the experience of ‘being a woman’ at that time, and in this respect they function as women’s films. Christine Geraghty argues that one of the main attractions of the British POW films of the 1950s is that, despite their military setting, ‘they offer a version of the civilian experience of a wartime economy’ with the camp ‘heavily bureaucratised’ and its inmates ‘vulnerable to enemy attack’ in a manner which reproduces the civilian experience of the Blitz.23 A Town Like Alice likewise reproduces the civilian experience of war but focuses specifically on the demands placed on women. The death of children, the forced separation from men and loved ones, the rationing of food and other essential supplies and the general tiredness and hardship – vividly portrayed in the film – would have been recent memories for many women in the cinema audience. The film in many respects functions as a form of displaced ‘Home Front’ film relocating civilian women’s experience into the ‘othered’ realm of the Malay jungle and, in doing so, removing that experience from its specific – and indigenous – British context. Curtailing Female Agency Alongside the portrayal of female agency and the strong female bonds that necessarily arise as a result of the women’s predicament, there are a number of elements within the narrative that operate to limit the possibilities of active femininity and so work to re-feminize the women in accordance with gender norms. Firstly, the inclusion of children in the group foregrounds the role of women as maternal carers. Mrs Hammond’s death leaves three orphaned children. Care for the two oldest is readily shared across the group whilst Jean quickly assumes sole responsibility for the youngest child, a six-month-old baby whom she is frequently depicted carrying on her hip. Jean is thus recast in the role of mother by demonstrating her capacity to deliver childcare and her potential as a suitable partner for Joe.24 Secondly, and related, is the relationship between Joe and Jean which inserts romantic love – the ‘traditional realism’ of women’s experience – into the female group. The couple first meet by a roadside, the women en route, Joe, a POW, mending the car of a Japanese guard. Their relationship is developed in two key scenes where they meet secretly at night and quietly discuss

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their hometowns and establish that neither is married. Although the scenes between the two are brief, they demonstrate greater intimacy than is afforded to the exchanges between the women. The women’s interactions are primarily concerned with survival, whilst Joe and Jean discuss a world outside and beyond the immediate reality. During the first meeting Joe tells Jean about his hometown Alice Springs, ‘the country’s all red, the mountains are red … and in the evening it’s purple’. Jean reciprocates the second time they meet, describing the countryside surrounding her hometown of Southampton as ‘green and cool … there’s an ice-rink there’. These different landscapes – red and hot/green and cool – reflect the post-war ideal of ‘separate but equal roles’ for men and women. The couple are thus positioned for a companionate marriage where their relative strengths will be complementary. Indeed, when Jean protests about Joe stealing food for the women, his response of ‘you attend to your business and I’ll attend to mine’ sums up how heterosexual relations were imagined within dominant discourse at this time. The structure of the narrative is such that the intimate scenes between Jean and Joe provide much-needed respite from the harrowing scenes where the women and children die, with their second meeting taking place almost immediately after the scene depicting the death and burial of Ebbey and three of the children. The heterosexual couple are thus privileged within the narrative, and the audience is positioned to invest in the successful development of their relationship. In addition to motherhood and romance, the bodies of the women are decisively reaffirmed as female. As they trek through the jungle they become increasingly dirty and dishevelled. Faces are grimy and streaked with dirt, hair is ungroomed and limp and make-up non-existent. Tight belts have been removed and waists and clearly ‘feminine’ figures have been lost. Many of the women wear ‘coolie hats’ which cover their long hair – one of the more obvious signifiers of femininity. Jean, the most adaptable to her new circumstances, has exchanged her skirt and blouse for a Malay sarong and a shapeless long-sleeved shirt. The women have ceased to look like recognizable women and Western femininity is in jeopardy. In a key scene occurring mid-way through the story, the women come across an abandoned colonial villa. Ebbey discovers that the water supply is still connected and the women, laughing and shouting, rush excitedly to fill the bath. In the extended scene that follows the women are shown bathing and washing their clothes whilst the children play in the garden with a water-hose.25 Two women occupy the bath whilst a third soaps herself in the shower. Jean

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has removed her shapeless long-sleeved shirt, her tight-fitting sarong now emphasizing her waist. When she removes her hat, an extremely long plait of blonde hair is clearly visible for the first time in the film. The combination of loose hair and tight clothing begins the process of re-feminizing her. Impatiently shrugging off her clothes, her naked lower limbs are depicted stepping into the shower followed by a cut to a close-up of her face tipped backwards, the water flowing over her face, open mouth and throat, the final shot suggesting orgasmic ecstasy. The shower scene suggests that beneath the dirt, grime and coolie hats an essential and sexually desirable femininity resides – one which is crucially coded here as white and English. As Josie Dolan and Sarah Street argue in their discussion of Anna Neagle, references to ‘blonde hair’ and ‘an English rose complexion’ are used to establish the whiteness of English national identity.26 An integral component of McKenna’s star persona was the English rose image and, whilst seemingly cast against type in Alice, these connotations are actually used effectively to re-establish this as a group of white English women. The setting is also significant: the colonial villa is a safe space where ‘true’ English femininity is revealed. However, whilst all the women can embody English femininity, the sexual aspect of identity is reserved only for the younger women. The older women are not seen bathing in the same manner, rather Mrs Frost stokes the fire, Ebbey is shown washing clothes, whilst the oldest character, Mrs Frith, sits fully clothed soaking her feet in a bowl. The older women are positioned outside the sexual economy, the re-establishment of their femininity limited to activities considered, within patriarchal logic, ‘appropriate’ to their age. The scenes that deal with re-feminizing the women in accordance with gender norms seem to function as a form of narrative compensation by being designed to ameliorate what has effectively been a ‘theft’ of masculinity (i.e. agency, homosocial bonds). In this respect the film demonstrates something of the parameters, or limitations, that operate when women appear in groups within films. Furthermore, the unity and importance of the group, which has been established by the time the women find permanent shelter in the Malay village, is undermined by the film’s flashback structure which locates female agency and female solidarity safely in the past. The final reel is set in the post-war present and focuses on Jean’s reunion in Australia with Joe, thus prioritizing that relationship. In the film’s conclusion, no further information is given about the other women and the female group is almost ‘suspended’, belonging to a different time and place and implicitly signalled as a temporary and aberrant state. However, what has been depicted is the

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hardship faced by Jean and all the women. Jean can enter into a postwar partnership with Joe on equal terms and in this respect the film’s world-view is in tune with the ideology of the ‘companionate marriage’ which dominated debates in the 1950s. In sum, the narrative seems to be balanced across a number of elements that can broadly be termed ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ within the social logic of the period. Romance, motherhood and the reaffirmation of the desirable female body find a place alongside depictions of female agency and ingenuity, supportive group bonds and a broad range of feminine types which extends – atypically in mainstream cinema – to more positive representations of older women. This mix of elements or textual multiplicity across femininities and life experiences is likely to have been a major contributor to the film’s popularity. The Female Group in Prison Social-problem films were a mainstay of British film production in the 1950s. A combination of melodrama, thriller and realism, these films explored a wide range of contemporary social concerns including prostitution, juvenile delinquency, unmarried motherhood and homosexuality. The reconstruction of society in peacetime threw up a number of issues around gender roles, sexuality and family life, and the ‘problem woman’ was a central figure in the genre. The social tendency to criminalize female desire gave rise to a number of films with prison or reform school settings, where women could be both punished for refusing the demands of normative femininity and rehabilitated to their proper gender roles. For example, in both Good Time Girl (1948) and Yield to the Night (1956) the female protagonists desire freedom and autonomy and refuse the roles of dutiful daughter and wife – a rebelliousness which society works hard to contain. In Good Time Girl Gwen Rawlings is a juvenile delinquent and the female equivalent of the male ‘spiv’ dominating British cinema in the late 1940s. Her desire for ‘pretty things’ and her determination to make her own decisions leaves her vulnerable to sexual exploitation by her male employer and physical abuse meted out by her father. The process of criminalizing Gwen is completed by a juvenile court that finds her guilty of a crime that she did not commit, in effect punishing her for ‘resistant’ femininity. A similar pattern is in evidence in Yield to the Night where there is a clear sense that the death sentence passed down on murderess Mary Hilton is, in part, retribution extracted by a society that is

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intolerant of a working-class woman’s aspirations for social mobility and independence. Despite the prison setting neither of these films are overtly concerned with the dynamic of the female group. It is Turn the Key Softly (1953, written and directed by Jack Lee before his later success with A Town Like Alice) – the first British film to include scenes shot in Holloway women’s prison – which attends to the figure of the ‘problem woman’ in a peer group setting. The film opens with three women on the day of their discharge and follows them through the course of that day and their differing readjustments to civilian life. The small group comprises three versions of femininity: young and flighty Stella (Joan Collins), the more mature middle-class Monica (Yvonne Mitchell) and an elderly recidivist shoplifter Granny (Kathleen Harrison). The women are faced with a number of life choices, which is a common feature of the woman’s film. Stella is torn between her desire for sparkly earrings and a ‘good time’ or the sensible option of embourgeoisement through marriage to a bus conductor and life in a suburban flat. Monica likewise must choose between an unsuitable, corrupt man or a respectable life as a secretary. Although the majority of the action takes place after the women have been released, the opening scene is particularly interesting in relation to the theme of the group. It dramatizes the reacquisition of their individual feminine identities lost after a prolonged spell in prison, where gender norms have been put under pressure. Lined up in front of the discharge officer the women are dressed in shapeless, standard-issue prison uniforms. Time is taken to individuate them through clothing and other feminine accoutrements.27 The officer reads off a list of their personal possessions to be returned upon release. Stella’s femininity comprises ‘One skirt, one blouse, one pair of stockings, one lipstick … two bracelets, one necklace, two rings’ whilst Granny’s list (‘One coat, one dress, one undervest – torn’) reveals both the older woman’s poverty and her position outside the sexual economy. Monica’s middleclass femininity is spared the humiliation of being paraded for the state’s inspection as it is implicitly signalled as the ‘right’ and preferred model. Hastily signing the release form before the officer has time to read out her personal items, she emerges from the changing cubicle in a smart, well-cut wool suit and discreet pearl earrings, eliciting various looks of approval and envy from the surrounding women. This opening sequence is a ‘narrative of transformation’28 comparable to those discussed in Chapter One and the makeover of the man-made woman. The ‘before’ and ‘after’ scenes focus on the reacquisition of normative femininity and highlight the narrative requirement to re-assert these

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women as ‘real’ women – feminine, heterosexual, desirable – so that they can take up their proper place in the gendered social economy. My other main choice for examination in this chapter is The Weak and the Wicked, which provided British cinema-goers with the first prolonged dramatization of life in a women’s prison. Directed in 1954 by J. Lee Thompson, the film was adapted from Joan Henry’s popular novel Who Lie in Gaol (1952) and enjoyed considerable commercial success, grossing £200,000 at the box office despite the ‘quality’ film journal Monthly Film Bulletin disparagingly dismissing the film’s collection of ‘familiar feminine types’ as ‘two-dimensional creatures, observed without insight or real compassion’.29 Joan Henry had been a well-heeled society woman but a gambling addiction culminated in a prison sentence and, upon her release, she drew on this experience for her novel. Thompson and Henry wrote the screenplay with Anne Burnaby, who was one of the resident scriptwriters for the film’s production company ABPC, and it was produced by Victor Skutezky, with whom Burnaby had worked on the earlier Young Wives’ Tale (discussed in Chapter Three). Burnaby’s acute feminist awareness and ability to view contemporary gender politics through a lens of irony had been evident in Wives, and her ‘outsider’s view’ would have resonated with both Skutezky and Thompson and found scope for expression in this later production. The demands of commercial cinema and the need to secure an ‘A’ certificate meant that many of the more radical elements of the novel (prison violence, prostitution and the more prolonged discussions of lesbianism) were excised for the screen. The film opens with gambling addict Jean Raymond (Glynis Johns) being sentenced to twelve months for fraud. Once incarcerated she meets a number of women from a variety of backgrounds: first-time offenders and good-humoured recidivists, all with a different story to tell. After a spell of good behaviour she is transferred to an open prison, Askham Grange, where she develops a close friendship with a young woman, Betty (Diana Dors). After serving the remainder of her sentence she is released into the arms of her waiting boyfriend. In a manner comparable with Alice, the film’s ensemble cast is drawn from a broad age range including character actors such as Olive Sloane (as Nellie) and comic actress Athene Seyler (as Millie) alongside the established younger stars of sexy good-girl Glynis Johns and Britain’s ‘blonde bombshell’ Diana Dors. The film’s portmanteau structure weaves together a number of personal narratives which, in common with other female group films, provide a range of feminine types and

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female life experiences. Four stories recount the women’s lives through flashback. Jean has been imprisoned for fraud, Nellie, a repeat offender, for shoplifting, Millie for blackmail and Babs for child neglect. These central stories are complemented by other female types who extend the range of femininities. In the hospital ward, pregnant inmates Pat and Andy are, respectively, cynical and terrified mothers-to-be. Naïve and easily led Betty Brown (Dors) is imprisoned for handling stolen goods, Suzie (‘we call her Henry the Eighth’) is a serial bigamist and hot-headed ‘foreigner’ Tina has murdered an unfaithful lover. In most cases, men are responsible for the women’s predicament and in this respect the film draws on the ‘traditional realism of woman’s experience’ that characterizes the woman’s film. Betty has perjured herself to save her worthless boyfriend, Norman; a futile gesture as he abandons her during her prison term. Single mother Babs is pressurized by her American boyfriend to leave her young children unsupervised at night whilst she goes dancing and returns alone to find the baby has died. Jean prefers gambling and the excitement of the roulette wheel to a stable relationship with stolid Michael (John Gregson). Her incarceration is therefore as much because she refuses the socially expected role of wife as it is for unpaid gambling debts. As Anne Morey observes, men in the women-in-prison films have a central role to play ‘as the agents who drive women to prison in the first place’30 and are also instrumental in effecting their rehabilitation. The purpose of prison is to recalibrate problem women to take up their proper place in the gendered social economy. The male chaplain urges Jean to marry Michael on her release (‘I wouldn’t leave it too long my dear’), whilst in the open prison women learn the gendered skills deemed necessary for domesticity and marriage: dress-making, rug-making, knitting. For the prison governor such activities will ensure that ‘women are fitted for their return to the world’. Perversely, pregnant inmates have their babies adopted after nine months and child-rearing – that most central of feminine skills – is withdrawn. Notwithstanding this contradiction, demonstrable proficiency in all other areas indicates that women have overcome their resistance to normative femininity. Prison is ‘at once a means of regulating deviant behavior and an attempt to restore the outcast to society – on society’s terms’,31 terms that are always shaped by the demands of patriarchy. Despite the expectations placed on women regarding hegemonic femininity and the demands of heterosexual marriage, female friendships amongst this group of women move centre-stage. Judith Mayne’s observation that the women-in-prison film is a genre ‘where

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relationships between women are paramount … [and] differences be­ tween women are stressed’32 might stand as readily as a definition of the female group film and may account for its appeal for female cinemagoers. Indeed it is the prison genre that, perhaps more than any others, expands the possibilities of the female group film through its prolonged focus on the bonds between women which, as I shall demonstrate, can be extended to include a reading of lesbian desire. At the centre of The Weak and the Wicked is the relationship that develops between Jean and Betty after they are moved to the open prison. They quickly become best friends, with Betty admitting to Jean how important the friendship is to her. Shortly before Jean’s release the two women are granted an unsupervised day visit to a nearby town and are shown laughing, chatting, and enjoying each other’s company whilst they share lunch and visit the cinema and the fairground. This depiction of intimate female bonding is disrupted by reminders of romantic love which are inserted into the scene: a montage of heterosexual couples at play at the fun-fair and the film showing at the local cinema – One Night of Love – being a reminder of what the women have been missing. Although the sequence culminates with Betty ostensibly running off to London to find Norman, what remains from the scene is a sense of how compatible the two women are. Other attempts to balance the women’s close friendship with recourse to narrative compensatory devices such as heterosexual relationships are similarly treated in an uneven manner. When Jean is discharged, the women share an intense emotional goodbye, exchanging home addresses and with Jean attempting to console a weeping Betty by promising faithfully, ‘I’ll send you postcards and things, it won’t be long … we’ll keep in touch won’t we?’ She leaves the prison and is surprised to find Michael waiting for her. Their relationship had broken down and Jean had no contact with him during her time in the open prison. Not present in the novel but written into the screenplay to meet the demands of commercial cinema, there is, throughout the film, awkwardness in the handling of the heterosexual romance between Michael and Jean, and the ending feels similarly unconvincing, contrived to balance out the more robust depiction of female solidarity. This has been commented on at length by a number of critics.33 Landy argues that Michael’s return is ‘totally unmotivated’, both ‘a purposeful form of self-censorship’ and ‘a commentary on the interdiction of female relationships and sexuality outside the heterosexual marital sphere’.34 Whilst Chibnall considers Landy’s reading wishful feminist thinking,35 it is likely that the scriptwriter Anne Burnaby, positioned as a sexual

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10. Glynis Johns and Diana Dors in The Weak and the Wicked (1954)

‘outsider’, would have been better placed to portray with subtlety and skill those relationships that disrupted the heterosexual matrix above those that readily conformed to it. The strength of the women’s friendship suggests the distinct possibility of lesbian desire. As Yvonne Tasker has argued in her study of contemporary female friendship films, ‘[w]hile friendship between women is a source of strength … the question of the closeness of that friendship to lesbian desire is in constant negotiation’.36 Jean and Betty’s day trip bears all the hallmarks of a date. We are positioned to read Betty’s abrupt departure to London/Norman as being triggered by jealousy at the sight of happy heterosexual couples at the fairground. However, as Jean shares a swing-boat with a man (the two women have only enough money for one ride) there is a distinct possibility that Betty is jealous, not of Jean, but of the man. The film that the women watch, One Night of Love, might easily be Burnaby’s ironic comment on what the women have been sharing during their time in prison. During the emotional farewell scene, Betty sobs inconsolably whilst Jean cradles her, suggesting the painful separation of lovers. Lesbianism

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is always a possibility in the female group film, precisely because relations between women are paramount and men occupy the narrative margins. The intensification of female friendships in the women-inprison genre seem to particularly push away from heterosexuality and towards same-sex desire in a manner not readily found in other genres. As Mayne has cogently argued, the ‘women-in-prison genre is one of the few established genres where lesbianism is not an afterthought or an anomaly. There is almost always a lesbian character … and lesbian desire is represented across a wide range of activities, from longing looks between female characters, to special friendships … to sexual activity, to sexual coercion.’37 The presence of lesbian desire specifically in the prison genre can be explained by the criminalization of forms of sexuality considered ‘deviant’, which took on a particular tone in the post-war period. Whilst the 1953 Kinsey Report drew attention to women’s same-sex desire, the language used to discuss lesbianism in the popular press increasingly positioned it as a ‘perversion’, pathologized it and associated it with criminal aspects.38 It is possible to see how lesbianism in the 1950s was marked by what Alison Oram terms ‘an undecidedness’ and was part of a wider difficulty or nervousness about the categorization of female desire at this time.39 Whilst the relationship between Betty and Jean is positioned at one end of a spectrum of lesbian desire – articulated in popular culture via oblique looks and the mobilization of particular codes – other characters and expressions in the film are more overt. Prison Officer Arnold (Joyce Heron) is the only individuated officer in the closed prison and is coded as the stereotypical predatory lesbian, achieved through her uniform, mannish stride and authoritative stance. The object of her affections is a young, first-time offender, Miriam, whose femme appearance (fair-haired, slender, pale skin) contrasts markedly with Arnold’s more butch persona. After the obligatory bathing scene (the women are shown in individual cubicles, their bodies mediated by the gaze of a patrolling female guard), the women cluster in the boot room selecting regulation-issue shoes and Arnold singles out Miriam for attention. Her eyes cast a lascivious gaze down the young woman’s body before she settles an intense stare on Miriam’s confused, flustered face. Arnold later checks on Miriam through the cell-door spy-hole with the young woman captured and framed as the object of Arnold’s gaze. Whilst the depiction of the predatory prison officer is clearly unsympathetic, a space is opened up where the male gaze is displaced and it becomes permissible for women to look at other women. Although the dynamic between Arnold and Miriam is

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predicated on uneven power relations, the close friendship that Miriam develops with a fellow inmate Tina is more favourably shown as equal and mutually supportive. The two women exercise together in the yard and communicate through their cell walls through a series of coded taps. This infuriates Arnold, who clearly has a history with Tina, possibly sexual. Arnold intervenes between the two women in the exercise yard (‘don’t get so close together’) and warns Miriam to stay away from Tina, claiming ‘she’ll only lead you into trouble’. The ambiguous meaning of the dialogue invites a reading of women’s relations with each other as multi-layered, functioning somewhere between platonic and sexual. In all cases, close female friendships are marked as divergent. Miriam and Tina’s coded communication contravenes prison regulations, as does Betty and Jean’s swapping of home addresses. Like many womenin-prison films, The Weak and the Wicked demonstrates the interest women have for each other. In this respect it pushes the boundaries of the female group film by giving considerable narrative space to female bonds and through the weakness of the heterosexual dynamic. Of the two films, The Weak and the Wicked is more radical than Alice in its gender politics as female solidarity takes precedence over the film’s more conservative elements. The relationship between Jean and Betty and their emotional farewell is barely disturbed by the brief surprise appearance of Michael in the final shot. Certainly the womenin-prison genre has a greater potential to foreground female relations. Prison is a space where women’s social embeddedness – derived from relationships with men – is automatically disrupted and female bonds by necessity assume priority. A space is cleared where lesbian desire can be articulated. This ranges from the ‘special friendships’ enjoyed by a number of the women, where traces of sexual attraction may be found, to an overt expression of sexual desire (although, in keeping with the prevailing cultural norms that pathologized lesbianism, this can only be attributed to the stereotypically predatory and harsh prison officer). Conversely, heterosexuality is afforded a more privileged position in A Town Like Alice. The inclusion of young children in this female group ensures that motherhood and caring remains a central role and narrative ‘anchor point’ for the women, whilst an extended scene of the young women bathing reasserts the youthful, sexually desirable feminine body. It was not until Robert Aldrich’s The Killing of Sister George in 1968 that explicit depictions of lesbians replaced the tradition of oblique coding. That it took until the late 1960s for representations of lesbians and lesbian desire to readily emerge in mainstream cinema points to

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how bold The Weak and the Wicked was in 1954 (within the limits of commercial film-making), something that can be attributed to the scriptwriting team of J. Lee Thompson, Joan Henry and Anne Burnaby. Conclusion I have argued that women in groups do not often appear in mainstream cinema because patriarchal structures (which clearly shape the film industry) position women in relation to men and the family. When these films do emerge, their presence demands our attention. In the 1950s the small but significant number of female group films produced by British film-makers can be seen as a response to social changes concerning the family, women’s economic role, their relations to men and questions about the nature of female desire. My discussion of A Town Like Alice and The Weak and the Wicked suggests that the female group is represented in a particularly selective way. Across the group, a wide range of femininities and female types are introduced (typically including older women) and women are positioned in relation to each other, as confidantes, mentors, friends and lovers. Robust female friendships, depictions of female ingenuity and, at times, lesbian desire are worked through. The appropriation of the male privilege, or ‘theft’ of masculinity (agency, homosocial bonding, androgynous clothing), is positioned alongside forms of narrative compensation which reestablish the ‘true’ female body through fetishistic display and reinsert men (previously marginalized) into the narrative. In many respects these types of films are the antithesis to the companionate marriage, which advocated that women and men’s most significant relationships were with each other and required each partner to look inwards within their marriage. In contrast to this official prescription, these films provide a space where women are permitted important relationships with other women rather than men, although crucially this is balanced by narrative devices which demonstrate that men are still important and that women can have agency whilst remaining ‘feminine’. It is precisely this balancing of ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ elements that is important in understanding the decade and the considerable commercial success of these particular films. The fairly complex portrayals of femininity on display in these films – characters differentiated by age, marital status and life experience – would have extended the range of identification possibilities for female spectators and met the appetite for textual

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compromise and ambiguity that motivated British cinema-goers in the 1950s. At a time when British cinema was producing fewer femalecentred dramas and their cinema attendance was declining, this is significant. These films stand as an important record that Britain was experiencing some social uncertainty vis-à-vis gender roles and femininity during this period, and that women’s social embeddedness in patriarchal society was clearly not assured at this time.

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5

The Figure of the Prostitute In this chapter I focus on two films from the period: The Flesh is Weak (1957), directed by Don Chaffey and produced by Raymond Stross for Eros, and Passport to Shame (1959), directed by Alvin Rakoff and distributed by British Lion. Both are centred on the figure of the prostitute and were released after the 1957 Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, chaired by Sir John Wolfenden.1 As a figure of deviant sexuality the female prostitute stands as a challenge to heterosexual, monogamous marriage and in doing so sheds light on the dominant discourses concerning femininity and female sexuality of this time. It is noteworthy that the figure is given a space in cultural representation in 1950s film. Conventionally, the prostitute in British cinema had been relegated to either cameo roles and afforded a degree of respectability by appearing as a ‘fallen woman’ in literary adaptations such as Nancy in Oliver Twist (1948), or approached through the distancing lens of history by appearing as a doxy in Elizabethan taverns (The Wicked Lady, 1945), or finally as a ‘good-time girl’ in aristocrats’ clubs in Victorian London (Fanny By Gaslight, 1944). Atypically then, in The Flesh is Weak and Passport to Shame the prostitute is the central concern of the narrative and her status as a cinematic heroine in the later 1950s requires closer consideration. Her emergence in popular film at this time was shaped by three factors: censorship relaxations which permitted the gradual introduction of more ‘adult’ fare into mainstream film, the increasing presence of sex in mainstream culture more generally (which ranged from sex education literature to novels and magazines), and a broader anxiety about female sexuality and the place of marriage within contemporary society. This chapter will open with a brief discussion of how these films came to be made before focusing on how the prostitute is positioned as an ambiguous figure, where new understandings and anxieties regarding female sexuality were being negotiated for the pleasures of the cinematic audience.

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Ambiguous Cultural Spaces in Mainstream Film-Making Neither film has received much attention in the critical writing on British cinema, despite the fact that both enjoyed a degree of popular success, especially The Flesh is Weak. Their focus on the female prostitute has meant they are either bracketed as part of the social-problem genre (discussed in Chapter Four) and afforded brief mention before critical discussion moves on to more ‘important’ films such as Sapphire (1959) and Victim (1961), or understood as precursors of the exploitation genre which reached its zenith in the early 1970s, and are considered noteworthy only as a footnote in that genre’s cinematic history.2 Their absence in critical discussions can also in part be explained by the status of the creative teams working on the films. The directors are not forgotten auteurs but resolutely metteur-en-scènes adept at producing cost-effective and populist fare. Chaffey had a wealth of experience in populist film-making, having cut his teeth on Gainsborough melodramas in the 1940s, whilst Rakoff (who later enjoyed a successful television career) was a young and eager film-maker at the time he made Passport. Raymond Stross, who produced a small number of interesting sensationalist dramas at this time, was adept at handling controversial fare and presenting it in a palatable manner for audiences, and he also had a reputation as a risk-taker in British cinema.3 Whilst it is not my intention to cover in any great detail the issue of creative agency in this chapter, it is clear that the key personnel working on these films combined pragmatism with sensitivity to a populist audience address. Both films were minor ‘A’ features exhibited at the top half of a doublebill feature, and in this respect they occupied a similar position on British cinema’s ‘cultural map’. More modestly budgeted than prestige ‘A’ features, minor ‘A’s’ spent much of their budget on casting American and European actors in the lead roles: John Derek and Milly Vitale in the case of Flesh, and Eddie Constantine and Odile Versois in Passport. The casting of these ‘foreign others’ was intended to provided gloss and glamour to the production and enhance its audience appeal. Displacing active female sexuality onto foreign actresses represented a return to the pre-war norms after the domestic femmes of the immediate postwar period (discussed in Chapter Two). Occupying a lower position in the field of cultural production allowed producers of minor ‘A’s’ more latitude in how they handled the material, and it seems that these conditions ‘freed up’ the film-makers in terms of gender representation. By this I mean that these productions provided a space for working

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through new ideas and understandings of female sexuality that were seeping into the cultural imaginary at the time. That both films received X-certificates will not have surprised the film-makers and this also contributed to the sense of creative freedom. Since the introduction of X-rating in 1951, audiences had become increasingly unsure whether X-rated films would offer a ‘responsible’ or ‘exploitative’ treatment of their chosen theme, and some cinema circuits refused to screen them, favouring familyfriendly A-certificates.4 X-certificate films occupied a cultural space that was marked in the social consciousness as ‘ambiguous’ and critical response to both The Flesh is Weak and Passport to Shame suggests how this sense of uncertainty and ambiguity shaped their production and reception. For Kinematograph Weekly, The Flesh is Weak succeeded as a ‘positive adult-thinking picture’ and it approvingly described it as a ‘sex melodrama’ which successfully blended ‘fact and fiction’.5 However, the more high-minded Monthly Film Bulletin dismissed the film as ‘crudely melodramatic’.6 A similar critical split is evident in reviews of Passport to Shame, with Kinematograph Weekly suggesting its ‘principal characters ring true’ whilst the Monthly Film Bulletin decried it as a ‘wildly incredible story … the most wholeheartedly absurd prostitute drama yet’.7 That the films support readings at either end of the critical spectrum suggests more than just a difference of taste or disagreement between exploitation and social responsibility. It highlights what was, in the late 1950s, an ambiguous cultural space where both audiences and film-makers were freed up to work through some of their own contradictory feelings about female sexuality and prostitution, shaped as they were by the ideas and myriad debates on the subject which were seeping into the cultural consciousness. These productions shed light on some of the beliefs and feelings about female sexuality at a particular historical time; both those that were deeply rooted and those which were more challenging and aligned more readily with the emerging new social order. In the films’ engagement with ‘deviant’ female sexuality they are suggestive of the social discourses concerning normal and abnormal femininity that circulated during the decade. My focus in this chapter is to provide critical readings of the films and to contextualize them in relation to those debates about femininity and female sexuality. My primary emphasis is on The Flesh is Weak as it is in this film that some of the tensions and contradictions shaping this subject are most thoroughly worked through. My analysis of Passport to Shame is briefer but no less

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essential for the more confident assertion the film offers in relation to femininity and female sexuality. I have found it helpful to draw on the insights of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, which have proven particularly useful for working through the relationship between social context and cultural text, and her observations about pollution symbols have assisted my analysis of the social function of the prostitute and helped me to explore how, in these films, she becomes an ambiguous figure.8 This theoretical framework is augmented by the work of cultural historian David Trotter, who has argued that mess is an integral component of modernity and that its cultural representation has much to say about a society’s structures of feeling.9 Trotter’s ideas are introduced in the second half of this chapter and are particularly fruitful for visual and costume analysis. These theoretical tools enable me to trace in these films the articulation of some elements of the new forms of femininity that were emerging towards the end of the 1950s. Female Sexuality As I have outlined throughout this study, female sexuality was a central topic of public debate in the 1950s and was part of on-going discussions about marriage, the family and gender roles which emerged in both official and populist discourse. For example, Kinsey’s two publications on American male then female sexual behaviour (1948 and 1953 respectively) were widely circulated and discussed.10 Punctuating these was Britain’s own ‘Little Kinsey’ Sex Survey published by Mass Observation in 1949.11 This sought to investigate the beliefs (and behaviours) of people on a wide range of sexual topics including preand extra-marital sex, sexual pleasure, prostitution and venereal disease. All of these social surveys were quickly supplemented by numerous best-selling advice books and magazine articles on the subject of female sexuality, although the majority of these were predicated on an active male/passive female model which privileged penetration and the vaginal orgasm. Whilst ideas about female sexual responsiveness and sexual pleasure were widely debated, leading to many women having increasingly higher expectations of their sex lives, the companionate marriage was put forward as the ideal arena for the expression of this sexual desire. This effectively ‘domesticated’ female desire and it is this domestication that underpinned numerous reports and publications from the decade by agencies such as the National Marriage Guidance Council and the Family Planning Association.

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Whilst there was considerable focus on legitimizing female sexual responsiveness within the companionate marriage, a parallel anxiety existed about sexual pleasure more generally. If sexual responsiveness and pleasure was so highly valued within society what would prevent other groups – positioned outside heterosexual monogamous marriage – from claiming it as a legitimate activity? Sex might, as Hall has argued, ‘manifest as a socially disruptive force’ and for this reason a number of moral panics connected to sexual issues became a feature of the decade.12 In the immediate post-war years the widespread commercialization of sex secured London its reputation as ‘the worst city in Europe’, a title which precipitated much moral hand-wringing, most especially around the time of the Festival of Britain (1951) and the Queen’s Coronation (1953).13 Ian Fleming’s ‘James Bond’ novels, which detached sex from marriage and procreation (an emergent theme in the 1950s), enjoyed phenomenal success from 1956 onwards and were the mainstream face of the strip clubs and pornographic bookshops that were burgeoning in Soho and further afield.14 Sexual freedom and sexual activity was increasingly associated with teenagers and, broadly speaking, a culture aligned with ‘youthfulness’. That the 1959 booklet Getting Married published by the British Medical Association included chapters entitled ‘Is Chastity Outmoded?’ and ‘Marrying with a Baby on the Way’ demonstrates how far debates about pre-marital sex had moved by the end of the decade.15 All of these topics were reported enthusiastically and at times moralistically by the popular press, which by the early 1960s regularly ran articles posing rhetorical questions such as ‘Are We Going Sex Crazy?’ and ‘Are Virgins Obsolete?’, and indeed, it was particularly around young people that anxieties about sexual behaviour and attitudes were clustered.16 The battle for sexual liberation and freedom from censorship was enthusiastically taken up by liberal intellectuals and was most famously encapsulated in the charges brought against Penguin Books under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 when they republished Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960. The trial has been widely understood as a clash between the forces of liberalism and the defenders of the established social order and, although somewhat mythologized, this position does capture something of the tensions shaping British society at this time.17 Dominic Sandbrook’s observation that as many people were ‘shocked’ as were ‘invigorated by the verdict’ (with one woman purchasing a copy of the novel so she could burn it outside the bookshop) highlights the many contradictions and inconsistencies underpinning the sociosexual framework at this time.18

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The Prostitute in 1950s British Society It is against this background that the Wolfenden Committee made its recommendations concerning prostitution and homosexuality. Whilst the criminalization of expressions of ‘divergent’ female sexuality was not new, the figure of the prostitute held a central place at this time in the British imaginary. Understandings of the figure were shaped by the preexisting belief that the war years had been a time of moral bankruptcy in which extra-marital sex and increased prostitute and homosexual activity had eroded the moral fabric of society. The prostitute was, as Carol Smart has argued, ‘a new folk devil in spite of an apparent liberation of female sexuality in discourses of sex’.19 It is evident that the meanings attributed to the prostitute were being shaped by discourses circulating about the nature of sex and sexuality as it was understood in the 1950s. With a stronger connection being made between love and sex at this time, with sex a means of expressing love and the ‘glue’ that would hold the companionate marriage together, the prostitute was the focus of widespread anxiety and subjected to vigorous condemnation.20 The ‘Little Kinsey’ Sex Survey of 1949, for example, reported that the subject of prostitution issued forth the most vehement ‘indignation and disgust’ from respondents, the majority of whose attitudes were grounded in moral objections (‘terrible’; ‘the ruin of many a happy marriage’) although the more educated tempered these by explaining women’s prostitute activity as motivated by economic and social factors.21 Interestingly the interviewers reported what they described as a ‘feeling of temporariness about attitudes to prostitution’.22 When asked people gave a strong opinion but there wasn’t a sense that the subject occupied their daily lives. These observations support Smart’s understanding of the prostitute as a ‘folk devil’; an idea or image of evil conjured up in the popular imagination, rather than a lived reality. In the 1950s a number of documents, articles, novels and reports emerged that focused on the subject of prostitution, some feeding into – and others a response to – the Wolfenden Report. Amongst these publications were Women of the Streets: A Sociological Study of the Common Prostitute published in 1955 by the British Social Biology Council and based on research and interviews conducted in London from 1946–53.23 Although it made no recommendations about how prostitution should be managed, it did acknowledge the economic factors governing women’s decisions to work as prostitutes. Dramatic increases in the conviction rate for soliciting in England from 1942–52 were cited by the Wolfenden Committee as evidence of moral decline, although the convictions have subsequently

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been attributed to an ‘increase in police zeal’ brought about by official and public concerns about prostitution and moral laxity.24 Conviction activity was augmented by two main pieces of legislation that were passed in the 1950s: the Sexual Offences Act 1956, which dealt with activities that encourage prostitution such as procuring, ‘poncing’ and brothel-keeping, and the Street Offences Act 1959 which addressed prostitute women directly and outlawed soliciting by a ‘common prostitute’. This effectively repositioned women from the streets into brothels and organized prostitution agencies where they were subjected to greater exploitation.25 The 1950s witnessed the increasing regulation of the female prostitute within a widespread concern (clearly evident in official discourses) that heterosexual monogamous marriage might not be able to contain the disruptive forces of burgeoning sexual activity. The Wolfenden Report The Wolfenden Report was explicitly predicated on the belief in ‘a general loosening of former moral standards’ that needed to be addressed, and that ‘emotional insecurity, community instability and weakening of the family [are factors] inherent in the social changes of our civilization’.26 By raising ‘the social and moral outlook of society as a whole’, largely through the intervention of churches and various welfare agencies, the Committee hoped that the ‘evil’ of prostitution would be curtailed.27 The Committee’s remit was to make recommendations in relation to criminal law regarding female prostitution and male homosexuality. The concern of the Committee was the visibility of the prostitute and her physical presence on the street which was deemed to be a direct affront to family life and which was thought to have the potential to impact negatively on the psychological development of young people. It argued that prostitute women ‘do parade themselves more habitually and openly than their prospective customers, and do by their continual presence affront the sense of decency of the ordinary citizen’.28 The behaviour of female prostitutes was deemed problematic – unlike male kerb-crawling, which the Committee considered but made no recommendations that it should be treated as a criminal offence. Further, the distinction drawn between the prostitute and the ‘ordinary citizen’ shaped the ideological thrust of the whole report, which repeatedly returns to the question: what kind of woman is the prostitute? The Wolfenden Committee, concerned to avoid the wrongful arrest of a non-prostitute woman, functioned under the belief

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that prostitutes operated ‘with a fundamentally different set of sexual values’ to those that shaped the behaviour of ‘ordinary’ women.29 The Committee understood prostitute women as pathologically different from ordinary women and argued that socio-economic disadvantages are only ‘precipitating factors … there must be some additional psychological element in the personality of the individual woman who becomes a prostitute’.30 Eustace Chesser, author of numerous reports concerning sexuality in the 1950s, defines these psychological factors as he reflects on the Wolfenden Report in Live and Let Live (1958). Subscribing to the belief that poverty has been eradicated in Britain by the end of the decade, Chesser argues that economic factors do not motivate the prostitute. Rather, she has a psychological predisposition for prostitution which is ‘usually the outcome of an anti-masculine protest’, one which is primarily driven by a desire to exert power over men.31 Commentary in the 1950s thus largely explained prostitution through recourse to biological and psychological factors which pathologized the prostitute and marginalized the importance of socioeconomic concerns. The Prostitute in 1950s British Cinema To what extent did films from this period engage with the figure of the female prostitute as a cultural type and with discourses of deviant female sexuality? There were a small number of films about the ‘social problem’ of female criminality, or more accurately the criminalization of female agency and desire. These included Good Time Girl (1948), which was one of the few examples from the post-war ‘Spiv cycle’ to deal with female delinquency. In this film the heroine’s desire for ‘pretty things’ leaves her vulnerable to sexual exploitation, whilst The Weak and the Wicked (1954) and Yield to the Night (1956) demonstrated how reparations were extracted from women who refused their proper place in the gendered social economy. As I’ve suggested in Chapter Four, these films provided a largely sympathetic exploration of young women whose expressions of female desire and sexuality challenge normative socio-sexual structures. The figure of the female prostitute is always a presence in these productions; common prostitutes feature in prison dramas whilst young women in seedy clubs, euphemistically referred to as ‘hat-check girls’ and ‘dance hostesses’, are aligned with the prostitute and signalled as occupying a similar space on the margins of society.

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In the post-war period films as diverse as The Fallen Idol (1948), I Believe in You (1952) and Turn the Key Softly (1953) all feature the common prostitute or streetwalker. In The Fallen Idol, a prestige production directed by Carol Reed, Dora Bryan provides comic relief as a prostitute. Arrested for streetwalking and taken to the local police station, she encounters a foreign diplomat’s young son who has run away from home. On learning the name of the child’s father she exclaims delightedly ‘But I know your Daddy!’ That such coded references to transgressions of sex and class take place in the cosy environs of the local police station (where criminals and police officers treat each other with jocular respect) affords the prostitute a recognizable and legitimate place within long-established social structures where she services the sexual needs of the upper classes. This is the prostitute as comic figure, a type that has long cultural roots. In a socio-realist vein, a recurring trope was to present the young woman as particularly vulnerable to unregulated consumerist desires and therefore at risk of sexual exploitation. As I have already discussed in Chapter Four, the young heroine Stella in Turn the Key Softly has to choose between sparkly earrings or a life in the suburbs. It is her desire for pretty things that makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation. A chance meeting with an old friend, Mari, whose profession is signalled by her six-guinea shoes from New York, pronounced French accent and jaded opinion of men, humiliates Stella who, ashamed of wearing last season’s clothes, briefly returns to her role of picking up men in bars. In this respect she is presented as possessing the psychological predisposition or weakness characteristic of the Wolfenden Report’s understanding of the prostitute. In these films the prostitute takes a cameo role and it is only in the later The Flesh is Weak and Passport to Shame that she moves centre-stage and assumes the position of the heroine. British cinema was not alone in its fascination with the female prostitute and divergent female sexuality at this time. In France, Jacques Becker’s 1952 film Casque d’or is set in Belle Epoque Paris and centres on the doomed love affair between a prostitute and a carpenter. The film is noteworthy not least for its unusual representation of gender, which, as Sarah Leahy suggests, sympathetically foregrounds ‘an actively desiring heroine’ at a time when French society was coming to terms with the war and women’s increased public role alongside the punishment of women accused of ‘collaboration horizontale’ with the occupying forces.32 Although the film was not well received in France on its release, it enjoyed immediate box office success in Britain and

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won a British Academy Award for Simone Signoret in the role of the prostitute. Its success suggests a British appetite for what was generally regarded as an ‘adult theme’, although reviews of the film indicate that such subject matter was more readily acceptable (at least to reviewers) when it appeared in a ‘Continental’ rather than a British film.33 The centrality of the prostitute figure in Italian cinema was even more noticeable and by 1960 the prostitute ‘dominated the Italian imagination and media’, following a combination of contentious legislative changes and changing social mores concerning sexuality which gave rise to new configurations of the cinematic prostitute.34 The prostitute figure did not assume a comparable position in Hollywood films of the same era,35 and whilst in Britain she is not as dominant as in Italian cinema, her presence is still striking and requires critical consideration. Although British cinema finds a space in cultural representation for the prostitute it does so in ways that displace the figure and the criminal activity surrounding her. This creates a critical distance that provides a degree of comfort for domestic audiences. In The Flesh is Weak Marissa (Milly Vitale) arrives in London from Italy, looking for a job (‘something a bit different’). She falls in love with Tony Giani (John Derek), who first installs her in his Brighton flat as his mistress with promises of marriage, then blackmails her emotionally into working as a prostitute for him. In Passport to Shame, East End gangster Nick Biagi (Herbert Lom) and his partner, retired prostitute and procuress Aggie (Brenda de Banzie), attempt to coerce French waitress Malou (Odile Versois) into high-class prostitution. She is eventually rescued by taxi driver Johnny (Eddie Constantine) and common prostitute Vicki (Diana Dors). That the prostitute woman in these films is an outsider to British society is on one level a comment on immigration patterns in the late 1950s and early 1960s whereby young Mediterranean women, typically Italian, came to Britain looking for work and were frequently employed as domestics and maids.36 But crucially, positioning the woman as an outsider and intensifying her marginal status by casting foreign actresses in the part is a device to displace active female sexuality onto a ‘foreign other’. Not only is the prostitute an ‘outsider’, but prostitution in both films is organized by criminal gangs that similarly feature ‘foreign others’. The Gianis in Flesh are Italian immigrant brothers whilst the foreignness of Nick Biagi in Passport is signalled by the character’s name and the casting of Czech actor Herbert Lom. In this respect, both films bear the traces of a popular understanding of vice as conflating foreignness and prostitution. At a time when racial conflict was particularly topical the

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belief that foreign men, especially Maltese, Italian and West Indian, were ‘“living off the bodies of white women” was utilized to enrage public opinion’.37 Further, a number of high-profile press exposés of organized prostitution in the early 1950s lingered in the popular consciousness. The most notorious of these was of the Messina gang, which comprised five Maltese brothers who successfully ran a number of prostitution rackets in Britain throughout the 1940s, until one of the brothers was convicted in 1951.38 In sum, although British cinema did engage with prostitution at this time, it did so in very particular and nuanced ways. The Prostitute Woman as Pollution Symbol Whilst it is clear that the film-makers had absorbed and made explicit use of many of the ways of understanding prostitution that had shaped the popular consciousness, what other more deeply rooted or unconscious beliefs regarding female sexuality influenced these productions? Douglas’s work on the use societies make of ritual provides an insightful approach. She argues that we use symbolic systems to structure our societies, and that the ritualistic distinctions we draw between, for example, purity and danger is our attempt to ‘impose system on an inherently untidy experience’.39 Pollution symbols are important for the maintenance of these structures as they define what is and what is not permissible in a society at any given time. Popular culture such as film is one of the mechanisms that allow us to ritualistically engage with symbolic systems. A key element which shapes both the Wolfenden Report and the films in question is the distinction between the prostitute and the ‘ordinary citizen’. The prostitute can be seen to function as a pollution symbol; she is (in a manner analogous to Douglas’s work on dirt) a ‘byproduct of a systematic ordering and classification of matter’ – in this case the categorization of normal and divergent female sexuality.40 As a by-product she functions as an anomaly, but one which is essential as we ‘reflect with profit on our main classifications and on experiences which do not exactly fit them [which] … confirm our confidence in the main classifications’.41 As with other pollution symbols, the prostitute has a vicarious function. Her presence reaffirms the boundaries of normative female sexuality whilst simultaneously acting as a proxy for divergent female sexuality. She is necessary to the symbolic sexual ordering of 1950s British culture.

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The Flesh is Weak This distinction between prostitutes and ordinary citizens/women is one to which The Flesh is Weak repeatedly returns. Marissa is established in one of Tony’s houses and given the services of a maid, Trixi, a retired prostitute whom she quizzes about her prostitution experiences. Trixi’s response is that she was ‘born to it’. This has two meanings. Trixi’s history of an unknown father and drunken mother who initiated her into prostitution at the age of seventeen demonstrates that Trixi was born into a particular environment which shaped her choices. However it also suggests that she was born with it; that is, the particular psychological make-up which marks the prostitute as profoundly different from ‘ordinary’ women. Trixi therefore fulfils Wolfenden’s analysis; the suspicion surrounding her psychological make-up confirms that her social environment is only a ‘precipitating factor’. The belief in a psychological defect supports the idea that some women have an innate predisposition towards prostitution and allows a clear divide between the abnormal and normal to be drawn. In the case of Trixi, the abnormal serves its function as a by-product of the main classifications; it allows us to ‘reflect with profit’ and in doing so confirm the integrity of those classifications. In this respect the film draws on some deepseated social beliefs about female sexuality. Marissa’s characterization is potentially more difficult to fit easily within the Wolfenden distinction between prostitutes and ordinary women. Described by Buxton (a reporter investigating vice rings) as a ‘decent girl’ from an ‘apparently normal background’, Buxton struggles to reconcile this impression of her with her role as a prostitute. Likewise, the first client whom Marissa picks up on the street is a shy middleclass young man who is incapable of having sex with her because her background is too similar to his own. He claims that Marissa is ‘not what I expected [and] could almost be like me’. She is therefore ‘not the real thing’ and he leaves without taking what he has paid for. For both men, Marissa fails to conform to their expectations and her character challenges the distinctions they hold between prostitutes and ordinary women. In her quizzing of Trixi, Marissa positions Trixi as the ‘real’ prostitute and in doing so reveals her own fascination with her as the unknown ‘other’. Conversely, Tony (Marissa’s lover and then pimp) claims she does possess the psychological disposition necessary for prostitution. He cites her desire for material goods, excitement and adventure as the motivating factor and evidence of her innate weakness, and in this

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respect she is positioned alongside other characters such as Gwen in Good Time Girl and Stella in Turn the Key Softly whose desire for ‘pretty things’ make them vulnerable to sexual exploitation. In a startling scene Tony launches into a prolonged vitriolic verbal attack against Marissa and the ‘frail sex’, in which psychologically weak and materially greedy women are accused of being the scourges of all men and he denounces her as a ‘hypocrite’. Marissa’s ‘foreignness’ (at the level of both character and actress) means that she is already marked as the ‘exotic other’ and therefore open to sexual divergence. Marissa defends herself against Tony’s assassination of her character by proclaiming her desire for marriage above fur coats, but the attraction of material gain is made clear. In one early scene Marissa expresses delight at the considerable financial recompense she receives for dancing with elderly and physically repugnant men. As her descent into prostitution gathers pace Marissa acquires luxurious clothing and jewellery. Her nondescript mac and flat shoes are soon replaced by an array of furs, diamond-drop earrings, stilettos, elaborately embroidered evening gowns and boleros. Thus a contradictory discourse is in evidence as Marissa’s wardrobe, even whilst she denies her interest in material goods, functions as an iconic pattern that undermines the narrative that punishes her for sexual transgressions. Her characterization keeps slipping across the divide between prostitute and ordinary woman; acceptable and divergent femininity. It is precisely this difficulty in categorizing Marissa clearly which suggests her status as an ambiguous figure and makes her so productive for analysis. Her character offers a space in which the dangers to the pure, and the pleasures of the forbidden, sit in a productive tension. Marissa’s status as a decent girl (rather than the ‘real thing’) suggests that what the narrative offers is the spectacle of her debasement, the corruption of the pure. It is advantageous to remember the importance attached to female chastity in the 1950s, with numerous women’s magazines counselling young women to remain virgins until marriage.42 Indeed, the notion of ‘shop soiled’ was a recurring trope of 1950s discourses regarding teenage female sexuality and something which young women were cautioned to avoid at all costs – clear evidence of a double standard in sexual matters.43 Many of the British respondents to Geoffrey Gorer’s sociological study from the early 1950s subscribed to this ideology and voiced their objection to pre-marital experience, with 63 per cent indicating that women should be sexually inexperienced at marriage.44 The film’s narrative is consonant with these discourses and serves as a cautionary tale. Marissa indulges in non-marital sex

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(although it is made clear that she thinks of it as pre-marital) and her question to the investigative reporter Buxton – ‘what will become of me?’ – goes unanswered. Her own assessment of ‘I have no future’ suggests that social rehabilitation is not assured. The concept of shopsoiling was one of a number of ‘merchandising metaphors’ used to validate the high premium placed on female virginity.45 It evokes the consumerism of the 1950s and the idea of consumption for pleasure and suggests the gendered transaction of sex and finance. Indeed, the notion that something becomes dirty as a result of frequent handling confirms Marissa’s status as a pollution symbol. In this respect it can be argued that the film offers to audiences a ‘known’ experience, drawing as it does on deep-seated beliefs about the necessity of avoiding premarital sex and the punitive reparations that may be exacted if one fails to conform. However, the rhetoric of virginity and female chastity that shaped the British cultural imaginary elides the gap between beliefs and behaviour. Kinsey’s American report suggested that the majority of women had experience of pre-marital sex ranging from ‘petting’ to penetrative intercourse.46 Chesser’s British study of 1955 suggested that 40 per cent of married women and 30 per cent of single women had experienced pre or extra-marital sexual intercourse and many women were pregnant at the point of marriage.47 As Langhamer has demonstrated, pre-marital sex gradually became more socially acceptable at this time whilst attitudes towards extra-marital sex, although this activity was common, became increasingly negative.48 1950s female sexuality is therefore marked by a sharp contradiction between the rhetoric of female chastity and the reality of pre-marital sex. This tension between actual behaviour and moral censorship suggests the lived experience of symbolic structures. For Douglas ‘[w]henever a strict pattern of purity is imposed on our lives … it leads into contradiction if closely followed, or it leads to hypocrisy’.49 Marissa’s character simultaneously opens up a space where the pleasures of the forbidden can be explored. It is made clear that she anticipates marriage and she accepts her position in Tony’s flat on the assumed basis that this is imminent. The sex she has is therefore pre-marital. However, Tony evades honouring his promise to marry her by claiming that his lawyers are delaying his divorce. The sex he has is therefore extra-marital and positions her as a mistress; a situation common enough in a British society where divorce was not easy to obtain. Marissa’s desire for sex with Tony is made evident in a remarkably frank love scene that presents her as sexually desiring and responsive; an ideal partner within a companionate marriage.

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She initiates sex, pushing open Tony’s shirt and kissing his bare chest, an action that culminates in him pushing her head down his body creating the suggestion of fellatio. This interesting scene has much to suggest regarding social mores of sexuality and gender relations. That which is covert and secret – fellatio and female sexual desire – is here made visible. Marissa’s actions speak of a desire for sexual fulfilment and passion, albeit within a domestic frame. Her activity may offer to audiences the contradiction of simultaneous disapproval and recognition, a reflection of their own behaviours and experiences. In this respect she fulfils her vicarious function by operating as a proxy for divergent female sexuality in the British cultural imaginary. The tension that Marissa embodies between the pure and the forbidden contributes to the difficulty in classifying her, and her status as an ambiguous figure allows for contradictory readings. Douglas’s work is again useful for the insight it offers into the different ways of dealing with an ambiguous phenomenon. On the one hand are a number of negative approaches which include ignoring the troublesome phenomenon or condemning it. On the other hand are a number of positive measures whereby the anomaly is confronted, and in doing so a ‘new pattern of reality [is created] in which it has a place’.50 Legislation in the form of the Wolfenden Report is engaged in the former, taking a negative approach that seeks to condemn the anomaly and physically control it by moving it to a place where it can be ignored. In contrast, popular culture takes the more positive approach; confronting it and making it visible. Marissa as an ambiguous figure suggests that some elements of popular culture at this time were creating a ‘new pattern of reality’, one in which new ways of understanding female sexuality found some expression. Not surprisingly, this was a painful process and gave rise to a certain amount of male anxiety and female uncertainty; hence the response of Tony and his diatribe against Marissa. Rather than reaffirming the classifications between prostitute and ordinary citizen/women, Marissa’s characterization encapsulates many of the contradictions pertaining to female sexuality at this time: women should be chaste yet capable of sexual responsiveness, a dominant rhetoric of virginity which is undermined by the reality of sexual behaviour. It is Marissa’s very ambiguity that is used to suggest a shift in reality to accommodate new forms of female desire and sexuality. This ambiguity speaks of a tension between that which is comforting for audiences and that which is more challenging. The Flesh is Weak succeeds in drawing on deep-seated beliefs that sex outside marriage is wrong and will be punished. But these beliefs are used as an anchor for

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audiences, providing them with a secure known position from which to introduce the more challenging elements of the film which involve the expression and tentative exploration of new forms of female sexuality and the making visible of previously forbidden things. There is certainly evidence to indicate that the film was popular. Kinematograph Weekly reported that it did excellent trade at the Cameo-Royal in the West End, breaking box office records for that cinema despite opening on a sunny August bank holiday weekend.51 It also did very brisk business in the provinces, suggesting an appeal that was widespread and not limited to London. It was noted that the film’s success was in part attributable to the fact that there were ‘as many women in the audience as men’.52 Raymond Durgnat observed that the film ‘caused consternation in the film industry by proving, not that there was a West End audience for sex, which everyone knew, but that even suburban housewives would flock to a sordid vice movie’.53 Its broad audience appeal was immediately evident to Kinematograph Weekly, which thought the film had ‘terrific exploitation possibilities’, with subject matter which had an ‘obvious feminine angle’ and described it in its review as ‘quite a woman’s film’.54 Why might this film tempt women into the cinema, especially at a time when their audience participation was in decline? The hesitant classification of it as a woman’s film is suggestive and its appeal for a female audience may reside both in its fantastic display of luxury clothing (Marissa’s wardrobe is breath-taking) and in its deployment of a romance motif. As Janice Radway has demonstrated, the central concern of the romance genre is for the heroine to learn to read masculinity correctly and to align herself with the ‘right’ man who will ‘pledge commitment and care in return for her sexual favour’.55 Marissa’s journey is a form of sexual bildungsroman and her character functions as a cautionary tale by highlighting the necessity of choosing wisely and the consequences that arise from failing to do so. Furthermore the heroines of romance are always empowered figures and as the narrative progresses Marissa becomes increasingly autonomous and less compliant in relation to Tony’s demands, her luxurious wardrobe functioning as an indicator of her independence. This is the prostitute as heroine-figure; she’s duped and victimized but she fights back. It is in themes such as these that a female address is evident, although the film’s appeal is broad and not restricted to women. In a manner comparable to A Town Like Alice and The Weak and the Wicked the film is simultaneously conservative and progressive, most especially in its sexual politics. In this respect, the film’s address recalls the multiple

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textual levels or textual ambiguity that I have suggested were a crucial factor of popular films that succeeded in the 1950s, in part because they allowed spectators to draw across a range of meanings. It is likely that The Flesh is Weak was successful because in creating a ‘new pattern of reality’ it maintained a balance between tradition and modernity regarding gender and sexual politics that was appropriate for 1957 and its contemporary concerns about female sexuality. Modernity, Popular Film and Mess The notion that some popular culture texts were engaging with the emergence of a new reality resonates with the understanding of the 1950s as a time when citizens increasingly engaged with the ‘project and experience of modernity’, that is, a post-war world marked by social processes such as scientific, technological and medical advancements, the growth of state bureaucracy and planning, mass communications and rapid demographic change, and the lived reality and experience of being in that society which could be at times exhilarating and frightening.56 Popular film culture symbolized modernity in particular ways. Harper and Porter argue that as the decade progressed a central concern of many British films was the exploration of a physical world which was marked by disorder and irregularity. This concern gave rise to a distinction between two symbolic worlds which were increasingly deployed in British film from 1954 onwards. The first world was characterized as ‘regular, dry, tidy, and empty’ whilst the second was ‘asymmetrical, wet, viscous, disorderly, and full-to-bursting’.57 It was the second world characterized by ‘wetness and mess’ that symbolized ‘modernity – or the new social order’, with film producers differentially employing these symbolic structures: Hammer, for example, approached it as ‘fascinating’.58 This argument draws on the work of David Trotter, who suggests that we can understand something of what he describes as modern culture by analysing one of its core features: its representations of the ‘idea’ of mess. By ‘idea’ Trotter means ‘a way of thinking and feeling, an emergent self-awareness’ which suggests that representations of the idea of mess can tell us something of the structures of feeling that are shaped by modernity.59 Trotter’s interest lies in the ‘[p]art mess plays in the dialectic of illusion and disillusion’ and he draws an analogy between mess and the ‘transitional objects’ of Winnicott’s research of child psychology.60

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For Winnicott, all human experience is shaped by a constant shifting between illusion and disillusion. Learning to accept the outer world or external reality means more readily accepting disillusion, but human nature and its experience is not restricted to two realities – inner and outer; there is a third ‘intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute’, an area that functions as a ‘resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated’.61 Transitional objects are linked with this ‘intermediate area’ and have a key role in the process of human development and the dialectic of illusion and disillusion. Although the transitional object will over time lose meaning and be relegated to what Winnicott terms ‘limbo’, the feelings associated with it are not repressed but are ‘diffused’ across the inner and outer realities.62 Transitional objects and their link with the ‘intermediate area’ between inner and outer reality are key to the dialectic between illusion and disillusion that continues throughout adult life. Winnicott argues that ‘the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience which is not challenged (arts, religion, etc)’.63 In Trotter’s reading, cultural representations of mess function as transitional objects. They are part of an ‘intermediate area of experience’ occupied by art and as such allow access to the ‘resting place’ between inner and outer reality that provides a form of ‘relief ’ that, for Winnicott, is an essential feature of human nature. Furthermore, such a resting place can function as a space where, in Trotter’s terms, an ‘emergent self-awareness’ can work through, a space where modernity and its structures of feeling can be expressed. Such ideas are useful for an analysis of The Flesh is Weak because, as the narrative progresses, Marissa’s world becomes increasingly messy. She moves from the ordered environment of the Brighton flat and the illusion of Tony’s soon-to-be wife to the disillusion of the prostitute’s room in the terraced house, and the status of a ‘Giani-girl’. It is in this room that mess increasingly reigns and indeed becomes the defining characteristic of her world. During her first abortive attempt to leave Tony, his response is to kick her suitcase across the room, spilling its contents onto the floor. After Tony’s violent denouncement of Marissa as greedy and hypocritical, her next scene is marked by her dishevelled appearance, her hair in rat-tails, her clothes and bed linen creased and crumpled, a stray stocking, negligee and petticoat draped carelessly over

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11. Marissa’s room in The Flesh is Weak (1957)

the bedstead. That the iconography of the fallen woman is deployed is axiomatic, but more is at stake. The couple continue to argue. Tony pulls a fur from the bed and dislodges the draped undergarments which fall in a heap on the floor. He throws the fur in her face, she responds by violently sweeping the bottles and powders from her dressing table, scattering them across the room. She finally makes the decision to leave the terrace house and be an independent streetwalker. As she packs her suitcase, the bedroom is shown strewn with clothes; numerous furs are draped seductively over the bedstead, chairs and tables are heaped with clothes and empty boxes and a muddle of garments lie on the floor. On one level the scene is used to suggest both the plentiful rewards that accrue to those women who fall from grace and to support Marissa’s claims that she is not motivated by the acquisition of luxurious material goods (as she leaves the majority of them behind). However the depiction of mess recalls the ‘dialectic of illusion and disillusion’, the intermediate area of experience between inner and outer reality. By ushering in a world shaped by disarray and disorder, this ‘resting place’ provides a space where Marissa’s emergent self-awareness can

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be expressed. A space where she can move towards a new pattern of reality and one marked by a more pragmatic understanding of gender relations and the necessity for her to be independent. If the mess that Marissa makes symbolizes a new pattern of reality and its structures of feeling, one that allows some expression of female sexual desire and independence, to what extent is this sustained? She leaves the mess of the terraced bedroom and makes a bid for independence, but is arrested and finds herself scrubbing floors in Holloway prison. The question of who cleans up mess is one that does not escape Trotter who claims, ‘[t]he burden of mess falls disproportionately on women, and on people of a “lower” class or race, whose discovery of themselves with a broom or cloth in hand is a reinforcement of servitude’.64 That Marissa is linked both with the creation of mess and the labour required to remove it suggests something of the tension and ambiguities that marked femininity and female sexuality in Britain towards the end of the 1950s. Cleaning figures in this film as a highly symbolic activity that functions as a form of boundary maintenance. Marissa’s act of cleaning is intended as a penance and is designed to reposition her towards normative femininity. Cleaning is not limited to Marissa but is an activity she has in common with Trixi. Inserted into the narrative at a particular point is a brief scene of Trixi in the hall wearing a crumpled apron and sporting dishevelled hair whilst she sweeps the lobby with a broom. The image is inserted between the two key scenes of Marissa’s mess and serves no obvious narrative purpose. However, it makes a clear connection between the two women and suggests that they are similar, marked with the same disposition or psychological flaw on which Wolfenden is predicated. Perhaps Marissa, like Trixi, was ‘born to it’? It also makes evident the burden carried by – and the price extracted from – women in the maintenance of the ‘proper’ or established social order. Thus the punishment of female divergence functions as an ‘anchor point’ or ‘secure space’ from which audiences may safely engage with the articulation of new forms of female desire. In this respect it seems likely that an unconscious working through of new ideas may be taking place. Passport to Shame The treatment of prostitutes in Passport to Shame offers a rather different engagement with femininity. Distributed by British Lion in 1959, the film capitalizes on both the topicality of the Wolfenden Report and the

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success of The Flesh is Weak. Its commercial success is hard to gauge, but its positive review by trade paper Kinematograph Weekly (which claimed that its ‘principal characters ring true’)65, coupled with the topicality of its subject matter and the casting of known stars like Diana Dors and Herbert Lom clearly indicates a potential popular appeal. Passport to Shame is structured by the symmetrical arrangement of the two female characters, French waitress Malou (Odile Versois) and pneumatic tart Vicki (Diana Dors). The differences between the two are quickly and efficiently signalled by costume. Malou has a weakness for expensive hats but is always more at ease wearing a dirndl and medium-height heels. Conversely, Vicki’s tight sweater-dress reveals her voluptuous figure and she confidently walks the streets in high heels accessorized with an ankle-chain. This doubling of characters reiterates the distinction between prostitutes and ordinary women; Malou represents normative femininity, Vicki divergent. Whilst Malou’s ‘foreignness’ signals her as potentially open to sexual divergence this is limited by her associations with Paris, her city of birth, which are wholly negative. During her first meeting with Johnny, the cab driver she later marries, she comments that ‘Paris isn’t gay when you’re hungry and frightened’ and mentions her brother’s death during the war. Alluding to this war-time past severs the links held in the British cultural imaginary of Paris as a place of sexual freedom, and undermines any notions of sexual expressiveness in her character. Vicki’s statement that East-End gangster Nick will not succeed in making a prostitute of Malou as she is ‘just not the type’ reiterates the belief that there is an innate propensity for prostitution and that Malou lacks the psychological predisposition on which the Wolfenden Report’s understanding of ‘divergent’ female sexuality is based. The normal/divergent dichotomy extends to the spatial arrangement of Nick’s brothel, which is located in a large house split into two halves. On the ‘good’ side (Lady Agatha’s) the procuress figure Aggie and the ingénue Malou are installed, whilst Vicki and the rest of the girls inhabit the ‘bad’ side. Lady Agatha’s is a neat, clean and ordered environment where clothes are hung in wardrobes and ornaments are tidily displayed on the mantelpiece. In contrast, the whores in the bad side recline on unmade beds; the iconography of the fallen woman again deployed in the mise-en-scène of the working girl’s bedroom, replete with its jumble of stockings and underwear. In this respect, the prostitutes function as pollution symbols, vicariously confirming the category of normative femininity.

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12. Publicity Poster for Passport to Shame (1959)

What troubles this neat, symmetrical arrangement is the presence of a sliding door between the two sides of the house with its function to bridge the divide between the good and the bad, the pure and the forbidden. Its presence suggests that social space is not as clearly delineated as might be imagined, but is in fact quite porous. The public and the private, the underworld and respectable society, seep into each other. Indeed, the fact that the door slides rather than opens out from one world to another suggests that one is not privileged over the other but that they are coterminous. Of the female characters, both Vicki and Malou pass through the door from the good side to the bad but Malou does so only accidentally (to rescue her lost kitten) and is completely out of place in that environment. In contrast, Vicki moves frequently and effortlessly between the two worlds. She alone has the ability to pass untroubled through the door and exist comfortably in

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either sphere. Her character, like Marissa before her, is marked by a degree of ambiguity; she is both prostitute and ordinary woman and therefore fails to fit easily into either classification, disturbing ‘systematic ordering’. As a character treated with sympathy in the film, her motivation is readily explained by a need to support a younger sister maimed by Nick, and she’s offered the opportunity for social rehabilitation in the form of marriage to cab driver Mike. Unlike The Flesh is Weak, in which Marissa’s ambiguity suggested a shift in reality to accommodate new forms of female sexual desire, Passport to Shame is not concerned with such subtleties, with tentative explorations of the tensions between the pure and the forbidden, the deviant and the normal. Rather, it takes a more pragmatic approach whereby interest in the good side is quickly abandoned in favour of a celebration of the bad side. In contrast to the controlled environment of Lady Agatha’s, the bad side is ‘full-to-bursting’ with tarts that gossip on the stairwell, hang their underclothes untidily about their bedrooms and drape their bodies over the balconies. Nick’s abortive attempt to blackmail Malou into prostitution leads to a drug-induced dream sequence that utilizes an expressionistic mise-en-scène against which Malou is man-handled by a steamy cauldron of writhing, naked male bodies. The fear is that this frequent handling will lead her to become ‘shop-soiled’ and therefore of no use to the husband she has been coerced into marrying to secure a British passport. This messy environment is not restricted to the brothel but spills out onto the street in the form of the friendly chaos of the busy cab office which buzzes with drivers and telephonists, and the post-war bombsite where Malou’s husband Johnny is left bleeding, face-down in a pile of rubble, after a beating by Nick’s boys. This disorder culminates with Vicki’s arson act on the brothel, leaving Nick dead on a pavement littered with bank notes he has thrown at the firemen to hasten their rescue mission, whilst Aggie makes an attempt at restoring a semblance of order by straightening the tie on his dead body. All of this is delivered with enthusiasm and energy and presents for audiences a symbolic world where mess and chaos is seductive and engrossing. Importantly, mess functions less in this film as a transitional object; it is not used to suggest the illusion and disillusion dialectic that is evident in The Flesh is Weak. There is no female-led clean-up operation at the end, which is often used to reinforce gendered servitude. The treatment of mess suggests the extent to which the creative team behind this film was at ease with the discourses of modernity; discourses that had become central to the cultural landscape by the time the film was

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produced in 1959. Perhaps by the end of the decade the ‘emergent self-awareness’ that Trotter associates with modern culture had been worked through. Indeed the film is noticeably less coy than Flesh with its repeated voicing of the word ‘prostitute’, which is entirely absent from the dialogue of the earlier film. What conclusions might be drawn from this about femininity? It is significant that the element that most clearly symbolizes the ‘full-to-bursting’ motif is the voluptuous, disorderly body of Diana Dors. Modernity is signalled in relation to femininity and a particular version of femininity. Malou with her dirndl skirt may represent the model of normative femininity prioritized in official discourse but she is presented as inoffensive, unthreatening and largely devoid of energy. In contrast, the casting of Dors as Vicki capitalizes on Dors’ persona at this time as a ‘blonde bombshell’ whose star image was linked to discourses of conspicuous consumption and, by association, meritocracy and social mobility. Indeed of all domestic actresses it was only Dors in the 1950s who could carry the weight of sexual representation that by this time had been passed to ‘foreign others’. The relationship between modernity and female bodies is not unproblematic, as Hammer’s later depictions of the uncontrollable female body as threat testify.66 At the end of the 1950s, however, the female embodiment of modernity is still presented, in this film at least, as something productive, capable of arousing interest without being subjected to punitive reparations. Conclusion I have discussed in some detail in this chapter how the prostitute is represented in two productions that emerged at something of a tangent to the cultural mainstream, and how those representations illuminate some of the wider debates taking place in society about femininity and female sexuality. The Flesh is Weak suggests the extent to which a new pattern of reality was emerging in which these ideas could be expressed, if ultimately not sustained. Conversely, Passport to Shame, coming two years later, has less interest in exploring gender nuances, preferring instead to celebrate the chaos of the modern world which is readily associated with the female body. There is evidence to suggest that The Flesh is Weak, which engages with some of the pleasures and pitfalls of female sexual desire and the consequences of pre-marital sex, may have had an appeal for female audiences, crucial at a time when femalecentred melodrama was in short supply. It is likely that Marissa’s status

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as an ambiguous character, together with a narrative that combined a number of progressive and conservative elements (effectively anchoring and liberating viewers), would have been attractive to many in the audience. What happens to the figure of the prostitute and depictions of female sexual desire after this important moment in British cinema history? 1959 is widely seen as a watershed in terms of film censorship, with Room at the Top the breakthrough film in its frank and honest depictions of human relations and sexuality. As the new decade unfolded the prostitute continued to find a space in cultural representation, typically in social-realist films that engaged with contemporary ‘issues’, such as The World Ten Times Over (1963), The L-Shaped Room (1962) and The Rattle of a Simple Man (1964), or in low-budget crime films such as The Shakedown (1960) and the Butcher’s production Cover Girl Killer (1960). Whilst the crime genre tended towards exploitation, the social-realist films offered a more sympathetic and nuanced account. In The L-Shaped Room, for example, a young woman, Jane, pregnant and unmarried, takes refuge in a seedy bed-sitting house populated with an assortment of ‘social outsiders’ (aged lesbian, prostitute). The middleaged prostitute Sonia (Pat Phoenix) is pragmatic and independently minded and although in many respects the house’s inhabitants are marked as lonely and pathetic, Sonia avoids the status of victim by explaining to Jane that her initial impetus for prostitution was that she ‘just plain liked it’. But in this and other films the figure of the prostitute reverts to a cameo or secondary role which limits her ability to shed light on debates concerning femininity and gender relations. That the prostitute figure found a space in cultural representation in the late 1950s can most readily be explained by the structure of the film industry, the mix of skills and interests of the creative team, censorship change and the dominance of the Wolfenden Report. That she found an audience suggests that the figure was being used successfully to address new ideas about female sexuality that were shaping the British consciousness. Rather than being the resident ‘folk devil’ that was preoccupying official discourses in the decade, these films position the prostitute as an ambiguous figure and are a site where concerns, anxieties and new understandings of female sexuality were being worked through in a manner that was palatable to audiences.

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6

Female Film Critics One of the most striking features about the 1950s is the number of women writing about film in a professional capacity, producing film reviews and film criticism for a wide range of publications and media outlets. Dilys Powell’s tenure at The Sunday Times, for example, commenced in 1939 and continued until 1976, whilst C. A. Lejeune reviewed films for the Observer from 1938 to 1960, although she had been writing on film since the early 1920s. Known colloquially as ‘The Sunday Ladies’, Powell and Lejeune have passed into the annals of film history, with collections of their reviews still in print. Whilst they remain two of the best-known women film critics, they were by no means unique in their contribution to film criticism at this time. Margaret Hinxman was a long-standing contributor to Picturegoer and published a monograph on Dirk Bogarde, Isabel Quigly wrote for The Spectator from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s and published, amongst other things, a monograph on Charlie Chaplin, Elspeth Grant reviewed films for The Daily Sketch, Nina Hibbin for the Daily Worker (and The Lady) and Penelope Houston edited Sight and Sound from 1956, after contributing to Lindsay Anderson’s journal Sequence in the late 1940s. Given the range and scope of these publications it is evident that women’s writing about film is crucial to any understanding of the film culture of the decade. In addition to the names above are Eileen Arbuthnot (E. Arnot) Robertson, Freda Bruce Lockhart and Catherine de la Roche: critics who are the focus of this chapter. Robertson wrote for Good Housekeeping and the Daily Mail and contributed to the Penguin Film Review. Lockhart had contributed regularly to Picturegoer in the late 1930s and became the film reviewer for Woman magazine from the mid-1940s to the mid/ late 1950s. As the most prolific of the three, Catherine de la Roche wrote for a wide variety of publications throughout the 1940s and 1950s including specialist film outlets such as Sight and Sound, Penguin Film Review and Films and Filming, and generic publications that included a regular film ‘slot’ such as Good Housekeeping and Picture Post. In addition to their written journalism, all three women were regular contributors to radio, specifically ‘At the Cinema’, the film

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review section of Woman’s Hour for the BBC’s Light programme and The Critics, a general arts programme, which appeared on the BBC’s Home service. Both the Light and Home programmes attracted a relatively mainstream audience with the former capturing 60 per cent of the BBC’s total listeners whilst the latter took around 40 per cent of the audience.1 At a time when film production was a less than hospitable space for women, with directors such as Wendy Toye and Muriel Box struggling to make films in the industry, writing about film for newspapers, magazines and radio was a more amenable arena for women’s contributions. This chapter does not focus in depth on why this should be the case in the post-war period specifically, although there is a long-running tradition of women writing about film and cinema, and addressing that writing to other women. This tradition emerged in part because of the popular assumption widely held from the 1920s onwards that the bulk of the cinema audience was female, that it was women who primarily read the numerous film magazines in circulation and that women were well placed to address other women regarding film.2 Because cinema as a popular mass medium initially had low cultural status, writing about film in the early years of the film industry was a job that required little training and as such was amenable to contributions by women, with some using it as a route into more ‘respectable’ journalism.3 Women working in Britain in the post-war period were likely to have benefited from these traditions and beliefs, which made film reviewing an acceptable job for them to undertake. What can we hope to recover from an analysis of film reviews and criticism? Review activity is part of a nation’s film culture and is one of a number of extra-cinematic discourses (along with promotion and publicity) by which films circulate in the public domain.4 The extent to which it influences people’s decision to see a film is notoriously difficult to establish, but as many as 76 per cent of respondents to one post-war survey claimed to read the film reviews of newspaper critics, if only to glean ‘information’ about films on release.5 Richard Maltby suggests that ‘criticism forms part of the sense-making apparatus that allows cinema to be meaningful in society’6 and critics can intervene in this sense-making apparatus, not least by championing certain causes. Whilst Lindsay Anderson’s advocacy for John Ford in the pages of Sequence is well documented, critics like Catherine de la Roche sought to put filmic representations of women on the critical map, co-opting certain films into a discussion about gender, changing social roles and positive and negative portrayals of women; an approach to the medium that reads it as a ‘national barometer’.7 Writing for outlets

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such as Woman and Woman’s Hour required the critics to respond immediately and directly to films when they were released, often after no more than one or two viewings, making quick decisions about whether the film would appeal to their audience(s) and the extent to which it was consistent with their own world view. Whilst film reviews do not provide direct access to audiences, the fact that the women were consistently employed throughout the decade indicates that their views and opinions were palatable to their readers and listeners. As one of the mechanisms by which films are mediated to audiences, film reviews and criticism allow us to disinter something of the context within which attitudes and ideas about ‘women and society’ and ‘women in film’ were being shaped and debated at the time. This chapter focus on aspects of the work produced by Lockhart, Robertson and de la Roche. Whilst this is not a detailed study of the three women and their work as creative agents, my choice is motivated by a desire to reposition these women in British film history. I have chosen them over their better known female peers (Powell and Lejeune) because they were equally prolific but the dispersal of their writings across a wide range of publications means that their contribution to film culture has been neglected.8 Two additional factors shaped my selection. Firstly, some of the publications they wrote for were addressed specifically at women: Lockhart for Woman magazine for example, and the broadcasts made on Woman’s Hour. Magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Woman achieved a significant level of distribution and at a time when the magazine industry was steadily expanding (sales peaked between 1955–62) it was estimated by the industry that ‘5 out of 6 women saw at least one woman’s magazine every week’, with Woman magazine one of the leaders in the field.9 The film reviews contained in these publications achieved a wide circulation and were central to the processes by which ideas and opinions on films were mediated to female audiences. They give an idea about a critic’s understanding of which films were thought likely to interest women. At a time when audience demographics were changing and the numbers of female spectators declining, this is significant.10 Secondly, de la Roche, Robertson and Lockhart engaged, to a greater or lesser extent, with ‘the woman question’; that is, what new and expanded roles were women playing in society and how were films depicting this. They praised films which they thought ‘realistic’ in their portrayal of women (Lockhart for example vigorously defended Woman in Dressing Gown against male criticism) and were dismissive of those they thought detrimental to their understanding of contemporary womanhood. Robertson and

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de la Roche published essays on the subject of ‘women and film’ in Penguin Film Review whilst de la Roche tried to persuade Woman’s Hour to engage more directly with aspects of film-making from a female and feminist perspective. These two women in particular held strong views on equal opportunities and sexual politics that shaped their film reviewing and criticism. In this respect they differed sharply from their male counterparts such as Roger Manvell and Richard Winnington, who had little interest in the role of women in films.11 Whilst there isn’t space within a single chapter for a detailed discussion of the myriad elements shaping film reviewing across different mediums, two factors are noteworthy. Firstly film critics had freedom of expression on the radio and film review programmes were expected to have a critical component to them, offering something over and above plot description. As a publicly funded body, the BBC had to ensure that its culture and arts programmes were not used as spaces for ‘shameless advertising’, and active criticism was the mechanism by which concerns that film reviews were nothing more than promotion and publicity for films could be neutralized.12 The comments discussed here, taken from broadcast scripts, were not drawn from pre-prepared reviews provided by the film studio and can therefore be taken as the views of the critics, mediated by the editorial policy of the BBC.13 Secondly, the comments of the women should be understood within the framework of the ‘quality debate’. British film criticism in the 1940s and beyond demonstrated a sharp preference for the ‘quality’ British film (defined as film-making that embodied the merits of documentary realism – ‘authenticity’, ‘truth’, ‘sincerity’ ‘restraint’ – and brought these qualities to bear on commercial film-making, with the intention of elevating the tastes of film audiences).14 Whilst British critics looked to British film to deliver these qualities, these terms of reference were used to assess all commercial film-making, and cinema that aimed only for entertainment was subjected to critical derision. Whilst there are clear traces of the quality debate in the work of Lockhart, de la Roche and Robertson (Lockhart for example praises In Which We Serve, 1942 because ‘the whole is beautifully knit together and every character rings true’),15 what is important for the purposes of this chapter is how they extend the terms of the quality debate to a discussion of gender relations and the representation of women. All three critics, with varying levels of interest and intensity, use ‘realism’ and ‘truth’ as the benchmark against which the representation of women in film is assessed and evaluated.

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This chapter will explore how each woman’s understanding of gender relations and feminist consciousness informed their work. Within the space available here I will focus on their reviews of key films which, broadly speaking, responded to what Jeanine Basinger termed ‘the problems of being a woman’:16 The Passionate Friends (1948), All About Eve (1950), So Bright the Flame (1952) and Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957). This will be supplemented with a consideration of the essays published by de la Roche and Robertson in film journals, and the longer pieces they broadcast with Woman’s Hour. Freda Bruce Lockhart Lockhart started her film-reviewing career around 1935, after a brief career on the stage. She became a regular contributor to Picturegoer between 1935 and 1939 before taking up the post of film reviewer for Woman around the mid-1940s. Never overtly feminist in her statements, she is nevertheless sympathetic to ‘women’s issues’ in film and evidences a liking for film actresses whose star personas were associated with discourses of transgressive femininity: Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Kay Kendall and Yvonne Mitchell. At the time Lockhart was writing for Woman, the magazine was the most popular women’s weekly in the UK holding broad cross-class appeal, its readership ranging from the middle and lower middle classes to the skilled and unskilled working class and therefore reaching, in the 1950s, the occasional cinema-goers.17 Its editorial policy envisaged and addressed its female readership as housewives and mothers, engaged in consumption for the home which represented, in Winship’s terms, ‘their own specific arena of work operation’.18 By 1949 the film review section of the magazine (‘Going to the Pictures with Freda Bruce Lockhart’) took up approximately half a page of a 40-page magazine and typically reviewed two films each week, with one film generally receiving more space than the other.19 There wasn’t sufficient space made available to review all film releases so a degree of selection took place, with films chosen on the basis that they would, or should, appeal to the readership. Typically, main features would be reviewed (Brief Encounter, Mildred Pierce, Casablanca for example), thrillers and crime received favourable notice (Double Indemnity, Ministry of Fear, Dead of Night) and war films were tolerated during the war, although there

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was a marked preference for British productions. Lockhart’s reviews assume a female sensibility in her readership that requires caveats concerning violence and grimness in films, and they focus on stars, their performance and whether the story/action/characters are ‘good’ and ‘believable’. Across the reviews Lockhart produced for Woman, and within the parameters I’ve outlined above, it is not surprising that she singled out quality ‘women’s films’ as noteworthy: Brief Encounter, Perfect Strangers, Now Voyager and My Reputation for example. These are films which deal with some of the perennial problems of being a woman (the travails of love, motherhood, domestic situations) but give them a contemporary or topical slant and therefore meet Lockhart’s criteria for realism in relation to women. Brief Encounter focuses on a woman’s choice between personal desire and duty and is praised by Lockhart for depicting ‘a real life romance as many will recognize it’, ‘painfully true to life’ and ‘instantly recognisable’ to the audience.20 Perfect Strangers deals with a divorcing couple whose war-time experiences have seemingly changed them irrevocably and contains ‘a theme that must wake an echo in many hearts just now’, although it ultimately falls short in a bid for realism by failing to adequately capture the ‘confused and natural anxieties many people in their circumstances must feel’.21 Now Voyager’s depiction of a repressed woman, struggling to achieve personal fulfilment and autonomy, is praised as a ‘straight emotional drama’ offering a ‘reasonably intelligent treatment of emotional problems which are more common and familiar than most women would probably care to admit’.22 The subject of My Reputation is the social disapproval experienced by a recently widowed mother when she becomes romantically involved with another man, and delivers a ‘refreshingly adult approach to the problems that will touch a chord of recognition in women’s lives’ and offers ‘a more intelligent treatment of the problems of a lonely young mother than Mildred Pierce’.23 As a point of comparison, They Were Sisters, about young women grappling with the demands of marriage and children, falls short of achieving its goals because ‘the characters of the girls are not well-enough developed to seem absolutely real, and their misfortunes are too melodramatic’.24 These ‘women’s films’ are praised not only because of their subject matter, variously described as ‘common’ and ‘familiar’, but because they approach the subject in a ‘straight’ manner using a contemporary setting and adhering to the tenets of realism, and it is in this respect that the terms of the quality debate were extended to the ‘women’s film’.

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Whilst it is not surprising that these films received critical notice – they were all ‘A’ features and some, like Now Voyager, were prestige productions and heavily promoted – what is striking is the relative absence of Gainsborough costume films from Lockhart’s film reviews in Woman. These films were phenomenally popular with a crossclass section of female cinema-goers but there are no reviews for the commercially successful The Wicked Lady (1945), The Man in Grey (1943) or Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944). In this respect Lockhart was operating within a critical orthodoxy which disparaged costume dramas that eschewed period accuracy, and she, like most other critics, didn’t see the potential for period settings to engage with gender concerns and anxieties through the lens of ‘the past’. The middle-class readers of Woman watched and enjoyed Gainsborough films and, although they were more likely than their working-class counterparts to either couch that enjoyment in terms of escapism or to dismiss its significance through voicing a disdain for the cinema medium,25 they found little validation of their pleasures in the film review section of Woman. Interestingly, Gainsborough’s most famous players are preferred when presented in contemporary drama – James Mason in Caught (1949) Margaret Lockwood in Highly Dangerous (1950) – all films in which the actors departed markedly from their Gainsborough personas. Woman’s film reviewing can be seen to evidence a disdain for mass culture and popular taste and attempted to steer women’s film preferences away from non-realist period drama.26 Whilst the reviews were selective and explicitly praised films that dealt with the problems of being a woman in the private sphere, there was a marked reluctance to extend that commentary to films that dealt with women’s public roles. So Bright the Flame (1952, US title The Girl in White) is a biopic of Dr Emily Dunning, the first female intern in a New York hospital in the early 1900s. Lockhart’s review praises the film, its topic and June Allyson’s performance in the lead role, and draws attention to the film’s love interest who presses the heroine to be a wife not a doctor. Lockhart opens her review with ‘[s]tories of pioneer women in history … can hardly fail to move those of us who enjoy the benefits they fought to win, to gratitude and admiration’.27 Implicit in this is a belief that the struggle of pioneering women is over and equality has been achieved for the benefit of contemporary womanhood. In the review there are no direct parallels drawn between women’s lives at the turn of the century and those in the early 1950s; equality has been achieved in the sense that women are no longer disbarred from medicine or other professions, but the sense that

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contemporary women might also experience pressure to be wives rather than doctors and struggle with ‘dual roles’ is missing from direct commentary. It may be that Lockhart includes the film in the review pages because it simultaneously allows for the subject of female equality to be highlighted whilst offering an indirect commentary on the parallels between pioneer and contemporary women, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. Lockhart’s film reviews for Woman are noticeably more comfortable making direct comments on women’s problems in the private realm (the demands of children, domineering mothers and the tension between desire and duty) – and the extent to which films engage with these in a realistic manner – than they are in offering a commentary on women’s roles in the public sphere. This interest in (and commitment to) commenting on women’s domestic concerns continued throughout the decade, extending beyond Lockhart’s writing for Woman to her work for radio broadcast. She appeared intermittently on Woman’s Hour and The Critics reviewing, amongst other films, Good Time Girl (8 June 1948), Letter from an Unknown Woman (29 March 1950), All About Eve (7 January 1951), That Feminine Touch (8 April 1956) and Yield to the Night (17 June 1956). In the space available here I want to focus on one film, Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957, reviewed for The Critics on 13 October 1957), as this film evoked a particularly strong and gendered response from the male panellists: Walter Allen, the literary critic and novelist, the architect and novelist Robert Furneaux Jordan and the writer Eric Keown.28 J. Lee Thompson’s film features Yvonne Mitchell as Amy, a middle-aged housewife who repeatedly fails at housewifery (her meals are late or burnt and the untidy house is strewn with washing and newspapers). Her frustrated husband starts an affair with a younger woman and decides to divorce Amy. This leads to an emotionally charged confrontation between husband, wife and mistress where Amy threatens to take a paid job to assert her independence and also reveals that the couple had a child that died in infancy. The film combines elements of social realism in theme (focus on the domestic and everyday life) with stylistic camerawork, dramatic music and a high-octane performance from Mitchell (who won the Berlin Silver Bear award for Best Actress for her performance in the film).29 The film was popular with women cinema-goers with Kinematograph Weekly suggesting that its ‘feminine appeal [was] compelling’, and it has subsequently been described by Jeffrey Richards as ‘a Brief Encounter of the council flats’.30 A woman’s personal and domestic problems are seen to occupy centre-stage, and both the themes and the realistic handling

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of them suited Lockhart’s preferences for quality drama. Many of the reviews focused on Mitchell’s performance, with less commentary on the reality of domestic femininity as experienced by the character Amy, and few parallels were drawn between Amy’s experiences of marriage, motherhood and domesticity and the contemporary lives of women in 1957. In contrast Lockhart’s review of the film for The Critics does begin to tentatively open up these questions for discussion. Lockhart opens the programme by saying that she found the film very moving and poignant and discusses her sympathy with the wronged wife whilst simultaneously recognizing the frustrations experienced by the other characters. She then finds herself in a position where she has to work very hard to defend the film against the hostile attacks by the male panellists. These critics mount a sustained attack on the housewife character Amy, with Keown claiming ‘the mother appeared to be almost a mentally deficient yet it was never explained to us why she behaved as a mentally deficient’. For Jordan ‘this woman almost deserved what she got’, whilst Allen commented that ‘the heroine seemed to be a moron, quite simply’.31 This very hostile and emotional reception suggests the men experienced the film, and its depiction of domestic femininity in crisis, as profoundly unsettling. Lockhart, by contrast, argues that the film may be exaggerated in parts but she points out ‘I also cried’, and defends the film as more successful in dealing with its issues than the play Look Back in Anger. Lockhart later goes on to describe Yvonne Mitchell as ‘the most beautiful, the most attractive, the most glamorous woman playing in British films’, who offers a convincing and ‘brilliant performance’ in the role of Amy. This is a very affectionate and personalized defence of the actress. The central character of Amy, and Mitchell’s performance of her, is one which clearly elicits Lockhart’s sympathy and which has deeply moved her emotionally. Furthermore, Lockhart makes an explicit identification between herself and Amy. For Eric Keown the film is a piece of farce as evidenced by Amy’s cooking, where ‘she only has to put a piece of bacon on the stove and it flares instantly’. In contrast, Lockhart finds in Amy’s dirty tea-table, covered in unwashed dishes, a reflection and a reminder of her own domestic situation, commenting, ‘I thought it desperately exaggerated the first time I saw it until I noticed one awful day that my own table – with two courses that hadn’t been washed up – looked exactly like that table in the film’.32 Such a comment, however, raises questions about what exactly Lockhart identifies with. Is it the dirty tea-table, or does that represent the limits of what it is acceptable to speak out about, certainly within

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such a hostile critical environment? It is possible to speculate that Lockhart recognizes and empathizes with the heroine’s depression, the themes of domestic entrapment, the erasure of female autonomy, the lack of self-expression through avenues other than housewifery. All of these are concerns that are present in a film which has drawn a very strong and personalized emotional response from this critic. These points of identification can’t be expressed in this particular critical forum and a safer or more permissible option is to discuss dirty teatables or focus on Mitchell’s performance. The critical response to the film – from both Lockhart and the male reviewers – suggests the extent to which a critique of domestic femininities could be openly debated within mainstream film criticism on the radio at this time. As my later discussion of E. Arnot Robertson will demonstrate, it was more permissible to talk about ‘abstract’ concepts such as ‘a woman’s film’, or male and female film taste, than to engage, via film, with the issues of how and why women might suffer in relation to marriage, family and the domestic. Whilst Lockhart’s film reviews addressed women’s roles in the private sphere – the ‘common’ and ‘familiar’ problems of being a housewife, mother and daughter – women’s public roles are missing from her commentary. In this respect she is entirely consistent with the editorial policy of Woman and other women’s magazines, which addressed women primarily as housewives at this time. Her reviews demonstrate something of the limits of what could be thought and said about women in that medium. Catherine de la Roche Unlike Lockhart, Catherine de la Roche was more overtly feminist in her address and whilst specialist publications such as Penguin Film Review provided space for her to articulate her opinions in detail, her film reviews for mainstream outlets evidence traces of her understanding of sexual equality and gender relations. Catherine de la Roche is the most prolific of the three critics discussed in detail in this chapter, producing a significant body of criticism that ranged across British, American, European and World film, and published in a wide range of outlets. For the purposes of this chapter I will restrict my comments to those that have a direct relevance to the subject of 1950s womanhood. However, it is worth mentioning that whilst de la Roche by no means restricted herself to the subject of women and film, it was one of a

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number of specialist areas that she returned to throughout her long career (alongside an interest in Soviet cinema and censorship). In 1988 de la Roche published an autobiography that charted her professional life in the film industry; from her work as a researcher in the scenario department at Ealing Studios in the mid-1930s to her later involvement with the New Zealand Film Commission. In this biography she reflected on the understanding of gender relations and sexual politics that she claimed had shaped her work. She professed a ‘dislike of sex discrimination’ and to holding a longstanding ‘passionate belief ’ in ‘equal opportunities and rights for all’.33 Her emphasis on equal opportunities gave her a suspicion of women’s organizations because they were founded on gender segregation. She claimed to have mixed feelings about broadcasting and writing for outlets such as Woman’s Hour and Good Housekeeping in the 1940s and 1950s because they were specifically aimed at a female audience, but justified her involvement on the grounds that they provided ‘an opportunity to give women their due by providing straight, as distinct from feminineangled, reviews’.34 For de la Roche, ‘feminine angles’ assume women are sentimental and are primarily interested in romance and flattery, whilst she claimed her aim was to produce scripts that ‘never talked down to women … [or] discriminate[d] between sexes in ways humiliating to either’.35 Implicit in her statements is a recognition that there are some areas that are of more interest to women than men (fashion for the self, decoration of the home) but this does not extend to a ‘separate spheres’ approach to men and women or an understanding that women are ‘equal and different’. Rather, she professed herself committed to addressing women as an integral part of the mainstream. Whilst her autobiography allowed her to reflect on how she envisaged her feminist politics, to and make statements about how these had influenced her professional choices, to what extent were these politics apparent in her writing on film in the 1940s and 1950s? Her two articles published in Penguin Film Review, ‘The Mask of Realism’ (1948) and ‘That “Feminine Angle”’ (1949), present her most sustained articulation on the subject of women and film in the decade, and are worth quoting at length to give a sense of her philosophy. In ‘The Mask of Realism’ she offers a polemic account of the failure of both American and British film to respond to (amongst other things) the significant social changes that are shaping gender relations: Our epoch has produced probably the most fundamental changes in the relationship between men and women ever known … the emancipation

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of women, the advance of science, economic and international stresses have presented men and women with a new set of choices and responsibilities, freedoms and restrictions, which affect their attitudes to each other, to marriage and to parenthood. New ethics are in the making. Every day we encounter the drama and complexity of it all: the woman who wants it both ways, expecting protection from the men with whom she now competes in politics, professions and (on unequal terms) in industry; the man … expecting to be served by the wife who shares the fatigue and hazards of bread-winning … The social and psychological implications are enormous … [but] [e]ven in the best movies the characters seem to be oblivious of all this.36

For de la Roche, relations between the sexes have changed profoundly and women have the freedom to compete with men, although she is cautious in claiming they enjoy equality in all spheres. In her later essay, ‘That “Feminine Angle”’, she outlines in more detail the failure of contemporary film to engage with the ‘new ethics’ of sexual equality. She is dismayed by what she sees as the gap between the lives of real women and how contemporary womanhood is portrayed on the screen. This is a discrepancy for which she primarily blames a maledominated industry, with producers who think that ‘women’s chief and all-consuming interest is Men’.37 Agents and talent scouts are taken to task for exhibiting ‘a mortal terror of “formidable” women, which meant women of any character at all’, and she glumly notes that ‘you would not have guessed, from our pictures … that this was the century of women’s emancipation’.38 The contemporary star system presents a problem because it has increasingly constructed ‘all-purpose types’ intended to please everybody. She writes: The inevitable result of this studied levelling was that, far from … portraying average women as diverse individuals, the stars, with some notable exceptions, emerged as synthetic figures possessing less character than real-life women … the vehicles chosen for them … give a deceptive picture of the part women play in modern society, or ignore it altogether.39

Among British stars, Anna Neagle is criticized for favouring ‘coy romantic leads’ above her earlier portrayal of ‘fine heroines’ like Nurse Edith Cavell40 whilst Americans Lana Turner and Lauren Bacall merely play the ‘angelic criminal’.41 Bette Davis and Myrna Loy receive special notice for their ‘integrity of the personalities’ but they too have been

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limited by the roles offered them which have ‘confin[ed] their scope to personal relationships’,42 effectively denying them the opportunity to dramatize women’s contribution to the wider debates and conflicts in the public sphere. In this respect de la Roche departs from Lockhart and her reviews for Woman, which confine their commentary to women’s roles in the private realm. One of the solutions proposed by de la Roche to correct this distortion is for women to have greater input in the industry: There is little indication how film production would be affected if women had an equal share in its control … what their influence would be if they were given their head is anybody’s guess … But it seems beyond question that cinematography can only benefit by giving wider scope to the intelligent and gifted representatives of womankind, especially as it may well be that their lack of pull in the industry is one of the reasons why cinema has given so very few significant portrayals of modern womanhood.43

Finally, in her call for films to represent modern womanhood as ‘an integral part of reality’ rather than ‘as deliberate “woman’s problems” subjects’44 de la Roche advocates that women not be dealt with as a separate item. In this respect she moves away significantly from the ‘separate spheres’ approach to men and women that dominated official discourse on gender relations in the late 1940s and 1950s, and these comments are consistent with her retrospective statements that eschewed gender segregation. The Penguin Film Review articles would have reached a relatively small audience as the journal had a declared readership of around 25,00045 which, given the range and tone of its writing, consisted primarily of middle-brow intellectuals. Whilst a specialist film journal gave de la Roche the space to articulate her concerns about women and film, her writing for more mainstream publications evidences a similar focus, although not surprisingly the strength of the message is somewhat diluted. ‘The Fundamental Feminist Problem’ In this section I will consider de la Roche’s film reviews and written scripts (both broadcast and unpublished) for the Central Office of Information (CoI), Picture Post and BBC radio. I do not aim to be

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comprehensive, not least because she published across such a wide range of outlets, but I’ve selected examples that seem to be most representative of her approach. Of the work she did get published, there is little difference in content whether it is addressed at either a female-specific audience or an audience presumed to comprise equal numbers of men and women. It exhibits the same concerns with ‘representations of women’ and gives equal space to an articulation of those concerns, and it is in this manner, as I will demonstrate, that she departs significantly from her male peers. Her script on ‘H. G. Wells and the Cinema’ (written for the Central Office of Information in 1949) includes a review of The Passionate Friends (1949), directed by David Lean from an Eric Ambler adaptation of Wells’ novel. She observes that the central theme of the novel, a ‘woman who desired love that would not deprive her of her freedom’, remains relevant to contemporary women who would ‘instantly see the parallel between … [the heroine’s] dilemma and its various modern counterparts’. Dramatizing the life of an emancipated woman, albeit in Wells’ novel from the Edwardian era, is a subject de la Roche considers appropriate for post-war cinema, describing the scenario as ‘the fundamental feminist problem … [which] remains … fascinating’.46 Unfortunately for de la Roche, the film fails to deliver, and she attributes this factor to Eric Ambler’s screenplay and its effacement of this ‘feminist theme’. She concludes by rating the film as ‘highly sophisticated entertainment’, but implicit in that assessment and her choice of terminology (within the ‘quality’ lexicon) is a judgement on the failure of the film to engage with the social realities of women’s lives, and there is a sense in her observation that the film has missed an opportunity for more pertinent social commentary. In 1948 de la Roche broadcast her script on the director Carol Reed for the BBC’s Third Programme. At this point Reed, alongside David Lean, was the most fêted British director in the country. De la Roche speaks very positively about many aspects of Reed’s work (technique, motivation for example) but takes issue with his treatment of women, directing her criticism towards the character of the girl Kathleen in Odd Man Out. In the novel, she claims, the female character is ‘passionate’ but she finds that this important element has been ‘considerably toned down in the film’, an observation that she likens to ‘other flaws’ in Reed’s work.47 She ponders why Reed ‘hasn’t yet made a film with a really powerful woman’s part’, a situation that she implicitly finds inexplicable because, as she has previously noted, Reed’s work is motivated by an engagement with ‘humanity’ and, in de la Roche’s

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philosophy, women are integral to this. As a point of contrast, Monthly Film Bulletin reviews the film deploying standard ‘quality’ terms: ‘Reed achieves a rhythmic flow which is unusually smooth and always truly cinematic’, his characters uniformly portrayed with ‘humanity and sincerity’.48 Richard Winnington praises the film for its ‘poetry … of the city’, its musical score and acting,49 whilst Dilys Powell’s only criticism is reserved for Robert Newton’s portrayal of the drunken artist.50 Whilst critics do place greater emphasis on different elements of a film – it is part of the process by which an individual persona is created – it is noteworthy that de la Roche’s voice was the only one that, where possible and within given limits, commented on the portrayal of women in the work of these key directors at this time. How did de la Roche’s politics fare in more mainstream publications such as Picture Post? Her response to Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950) is typically enlightening. The film stars Bette Davis as Margo Channing, a talented forty-something Broadway actress. Margo is challenged by an ambitious newcomer, Eve, and at the height of her career she gives up the theatre in favour of marriage. This tension and choice for women between work and marriage is a theme consistent with the ‘dual roles’ approach widely debated in British society in the 1950s, and the decisions facing the female protagonist would have resonated with many women in the cinema audience. As both Martin Shingler and Mark Glancy have demonstrated, Bette Davis’s star persona was associated in the British consciousness with female independence, and fans and critics frequently praised her for her acting ability.51 She is one of the few stars singled out by de la Roche as resistant to the ‘levelling down’ process in Hollywood, and as such she possesses the range to depict women as the ‘diverse individuals’ that they are. Shingler, in his study of the film’s historical reception, argues that the main body of criticism for the film focused on either Davis’s performance or the witty script, and in doing so eschewed any engagement with ‘the woman problem’.52 Within British criticism, Monthly Film Bulletin approached the film as a ‘scriptwriter’s film’ which offered a ‘commentary of theatre and theatrical people’,53 whilst C. A. Lejeune for the Observer commented approvingly on Davis’s ‘sheer integrity of performance’.54 They, like many other reviewers, missed the ‘woman point’. Characteristically, de la Roche was more circumspect. Whilst she praised the range of Davis as a performer, and the talents of the director/ writer Joseph Mankiewicz, the ending was clearly not in keeping with her version of feminism and sexual politics. She drew attention to what she termed ‘this dangerously romantic ending’ and postulated

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whether it was the ‘magic’ of Bette Davis that ‘compels one to accept the compromise’.55 For de la Roche, marriage is not the fulfilment of a woman’s main goal, especially when that marriage is founded on resigning a successful career. In a manner comparable to her radio scripts on Reed et al. (previously discussed), de la Roche’s review of All about Eve characteristically draws attention to how the film represents women’s life choices and the limits of those choices. The examples discussed here are evidence of how her body of criticism is peppered with observations about and criticisms of women’s roles. They are often nothing more than a sentence or two in film reviews (as befits either her own interests, the editorial policy of the publication and the palate of her audience) but they are a continuously recurring feature of her criticism and they demonstrate the limited extent to which a space could be negotiated to express these views at the time. What wasn’t available to her in the mainstream was space for a more prolonged and detailed discussion of women and cinema, and in this next section I want to consider one of her unpublished radio scripts. Women, Film and Radio De la Roche had been broadcasting on a freelance basis with BBC radio since approximately 1941, and contributed to a number of programmes until her departure for New Zealand in 1959. Throughout her working relationship with the BBC she (along with other freelance journalists) submitted a number of speculative scripts for consideration for broadcast. On 9 August 1948 she put forward a detailed, three-page letter to the producer of the Talks Department outlining her idea for a six-programme series to be broadcast on Woman’s Hour. She intended it as an entertaining piece on the main aspects of film-making, to include what she deemed an appropriate feminine address. It was an ambitious project and the six programmes covered: 1. The role of the Producer, with particular reference to Betty Box and the recently successful ‘Hugget’ series (co-scripted by Muriel Box), 2. Scriptwriters, and the view of a female scriptwriter on female roles, 3. Directing, to include Jill Craigie (of whom de la Roche thought highly), and Sidney Gilliat, who she described as having a

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‘flair for actresses and charactering women with … a lack of sentimentality’, 4. Designing, with Edward Carrick and Carmen Dillon. De la Roche considered ‘interior decoration a subject of interest to housewives but not generally appreciated as part of movie-making’, 5. Costume design, an area where women excel, and focusing on the work of Elizabeth Haffenden and Julie Harris, 6. Acting.56 In many ways the proposal encapsulates de la Roche’s feminist politics. The programmes are intended to raise the profile of female artists (through the inclusion of Muriel and Betty Box, Jill Craigie, Carmen Dillon) and to expand the horizons of women’s interests in relation to film beyond what she elsewhere terms the ‘trivial and phony’;57 typically star personalities. She also wants to capitalize on elements she thinks are known to be of interest to women but which are not widely recognized in the current writing on film. Her programme on ‘Designing’ (or art direction) recognizes set design as an approved female sphere and suggests she is clearly attuned to costume and décor as elements requiring feminine reading competences, the marginalization of which, within mainstream critical discourse, her project seeks to redress. In sum, she wants to both expand women’s film interests beyond the usual whilst simultaneously drawing on women’s interests and knowledge to expand how film-making is understood. The proposal is rejected as unsuitable, with the formal response given to de la Roche that the subject is too narrow for the wide audience that Woman’s Hour attracts,58 although it is not clear whether the ‘narrowness’ of the subject matter is the ‘woman’ angle, the ‘cinema’ angle or both. Internal BBC memos dismiss the script as ‘the writing is slipshod and unbroadcastable … the ideas are too general and dogmatic and without adequate illustration’.59 Subsequent scripts on the broad subject of ‘women and film’ were rejected; one on ‘Women and Cinema’ in 1949, another in the same year on ‘Anna Magnani’ and another in 1956 for a proposal on the ‘Modern Heroine’. Some of de la Roche’s non-gender-specific proposals were also rejected, namely a review of King Vidor’s War and Peace in 1956 and a 1948 proposal on Eisenstein, whilst a 1956 piece on Vincente Minnelli was accepted. Minnelli was presumably a safer and more palatable subject for radio broadcast than the seemingly indigestible Russian theories of montage or those of sex equality in film. Whilst the programmes as imagined by de la Roche were never broadcast, they do demonstrate the extent to which she would have gone with the subject

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had she found backing from radio producers. Internal memos from the Talks Department suggest that Woman’s Hour had a preference for biographies of film stars at this time60 – an approach to film talks that evidences an incompatibility with the more imaginative proposals put forward by de la Roche. As a freelance critic with a living to earn, de la Roche’s scripts are speculative but they are not wildly so, and she presumably thought there was an audience for the subject matter she proposed. In the correspondence to the BBC which accompanies some of her scripts she comments that she has been lecturing on the subject of ‘women and film’ to Women’s Guilds and local branches of the National Council of Women (NCW), in which she found a receptive audience.61 Both organizations sought, in different ways, to raise the profile of women. Whilst Women’s Guilds were non-political and functioned as a point of contact for women, the NCW (an umbrella organization to which women’s groups affiliated) argued for female equality and worked towards ‘the removal of all disabilities of women whether legal, economic or social’.62 One of the NCW’s many interests was media representation of women and in 1962 a number of its groups reported on the issue of sex and violence to the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting.63 To date my research hasn’t identified any records regarding de la Roche’s lectures to these women’s groups, but as the profile of the groups fitted her own political consciousness (accepting her caveats about separatist organizations) it seems likely that she used these alternative routes to reach the audience denied to her by the producers of Woman’s Hour. On a final note, de la Roche mentions in one of her letters – which proposes a talk on Anna Magnani, the kind of ‘modern heroine’ she admires – that she has found through her lectures to women’s organizations that women have an interest in hearing about ‘foreign pictures’ even when they can’t actually view them.64 Whilst the growth in specialized cinemas and screens for European films burgeoned in the 1950s (although the metropolises were always best served) de la Roche’s comments indicate that women’s interest in a subject cannot be deduced solely from their attendance (or lack of ) at film screenings. At a time when 50 per cent of British housewives reported they never went to the cinema, affiliated activities like film talks functioned to address needs that were not being readily met through other mechanisms.65

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E. Arnot Robertson Catherine de la Roche was not alone in making a number of explicitly critical statements on the subject of female representation in contemporary film. Her peer E. Arnot Robertson was equally outspoken and likewise found the pages of Penguin Film Review a hospitable outlet for her views. Robertson had been a successful novelist in the 1930s before turning to film reviewing and criticism in the 1940s and 1950s. Once again her body of work is dispersed across a number of outlets which ranged from the Daily Mail and Good Housekeeping to numerous radio broadcasts for the BBC’s Home and Light Programmes including Woman’s Hour and The Critics. Her style of writing is strident and sarcastic and she had a reputation for being outspoken and independent. This reputation had, in part, been fostered by the libel suit she brought against MGM in response to their written objection to the BBC concerning her review of their 1946 film Green Years, acerbically described by Robertson as ‘pseudo-Scottish whimsy’.66 Although Robertson eventually lost the case, the libel suit attracted considerable publicity with Robertson’s unsuccessful appeal heard by the House of Lords. I want to concentrate on two pieces of writing: her article ‘Woman and the Film’ published in Penguin Film Review in 1947 and her script ‘A Woman’s Film’ broadcast on Woman’s Hour on 13 May 1959. In Penguin Film Review Robertson comments on what she sees as a marked gap between the reality of women’s lives and the representations of them that appear on the screen, particularly in respect of relations between the sexes, where she argues ‘cinema has lagged far behind contemporary feeling’. She continues: Identifying myself for the moment with the heroine on the screen, as the female part of a good audience is supposed to do, I feel it is high time I was allowed to do something besides looking cute in order to inspire true love, of the undying variety, in the hero. Still, in ninety-nine films out of a hundred I don’t have to do anything, say anything or be anything endearing: I just look cute.67

Her sense of frustration concerning women’s reduction to merely physical appearance in filmic representation extends beyond sexual relationships to representations of what Robertson terms ‘maternal love’, which she finds equally out of touch with reality:

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Any good, honest mother knows that the most pleasing sight in the world is the back-view of her children going off almost anywhere (so long as it’s safe and they don’t actively dislike it, in order that she shan’t have to worry about them or even think of them at all) for several hours, in which she will not have to answer their questions or subordinate her interests to theirs. And she admits that all school holidays seem much too long. Has there ever been a film which reflected this prevalent feeling? No, screen mothers enjoy the company of their young twentyfour hours a day, God and the directors alone know how.68

Unlike de la Roche, who calls for more women in the industry to redress the problem of women’s representation in film, Robertson doesn’t offer any solutions to the predicament (indeed, the article characteristically wanders off the point to discuss the quality of recent British pictures and the need to educate the young to develop their taste for good films). Her article is, however, a striking challenge to the valorization of the mother–child bond prevalent in official discourses69 and the image of excessive mother-love and self-sacrificial motherhood prevalent in film production (Mildred Pierce, 1945, for example).70 Her call for a more ‘realistic’ portrayal of women and their lived experiences, and her belief that contemporary cinema was unrealistic vis-à-vis women, may have been out of step with female audiences (the success of films like Mildred Pierce suggests their capacity to speak to women and for women to negotiate with these texts) but her writing demonstrates how the terms of the quality debate (‘authenticity’; ‘truth’) were being extended by these female critics to representations of women and their lives in film. Whilst Penguin Film Review proved most hospitable to an expression of these ideas at the end of the 1940s, they found space at the end of the 1950s in more mainstream outlets such as Woman’s Hour. In her 1959 broadcast for Woman’s Hour Robertson debates the concept of ‘a woman’s picture’ with John Russell Taylor, the theatre and film critic. She challenges the assumptions made about women’s film preferences that the category of ‘a woman’s film’ is inevitably based on: I think that on the whole the makers have an extraordinary view of what women want. Which is very often not based at all on the very widely changing views of women in the world today … I do not believe that women would not go to the cinema if the love interest was not put into

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a picture. I do not believe that women insist on having a happy ending in a picture where quite obviously it doesn’t belong.71

She accepts that the industry may work with a category of ‘a woman’s film’ but argues that women should not be classed like this in film anymore. Furthermore, she believes it is dangerous to make assumptions about women and their film preferences on the basis of this category as it is predicated on particular and negative assumptions about women that are held by male producers. Robertson’s comment on the ‘extraordinary view of what women want’ is comparable to de la Roche’s belief that producers think ‘women’s chief and all-consuming interest is Men’.72 Robertson bases her position on the assumption that women and men are equal and that gender difference is superfluous as a defining category for understanding people’s film tastes: I feel that women and men are not now intellectually anything like as far apart as they’re generally supposed to be and that there are many men with womanly tastes, women with manly tastes and that you cannot say this is a woman’s picture and that’s a man’s picture.73

She concludes that the gap between men and woman has narrowed to such an extent that the ‘we boys and you girls attitude of dividing human beings in this way in matters of art and taste’ is redundant.74 She comments that a million women may cry over Emergency Ward 10 but that does not ‘rule out the number of men who will also go and be moved by it’.75 Robertson’s views, like those of de la Roche, are not underpinned by the notion of ‘equal and different’ and the separate spheres approach to gender relations that dominated so many debates in the 1950s. For Robertson, the old categories of sexual difference were played out, with contemporary cinema needing to update its representations of gender in ways that responded to changing views about women and their roles in society. The programme for Woman’s Hour demonstrates how far ideas about women and film had moved into mainstream discussion by the end of the decade. In 1949 de la Roche couldn’t find any broadcast space for her series of programmes intended to draw attention to female artists or her proposal for a talk on ‘Women and Cinema’. By contrast, in 1959 Robertson was able to argue that contemporary cinema’s representations of women were outdated, and

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to defend that position by referencing a framework of sex equality that wasn’t predicated on difference. Although Woman’s Hour was proving to be more hospitable to engaging with media representations of women, the critical drubbing that Lockhart and Woman in a Dressing Gown received on The Critics two years earlier suggests how the mainstream critical establishment had yet to reach a fuller understanding of the pressures women faced in the domestic realm. Conclusion All three women finished film reviewing in Britain by the end of the decade; de la Roche left for New Zealand, Robertson died in 1961 and Lockhart took up disability activism. Their writing demonstrates how there was space across the decade for ‘women’s issues’ to be aired in film reviewing and criticism, and for contemporary cinema to be challenged where it failed to respond to women’s changing social realities. Not surprisingly, the more overtly critical statements on the subject of women and film – those that commented on the changing relations between men and women and moved the debate beyond the private into the public realm – received their most sustained articulation in specialist outlets like Penguin Film Review. This demonstrates that they were at something of a tangent to official discourses addressing women as wives and mothers. However, de la Roche’s reviews are peppered with ‘feminist asides’ (Ambler’s screenplay effaces the ‘feminist theme’, Carol Reed hasn’t yet delivered a ‘really powerful woman’s part’, All About Eve offers a ‘dangerously romantic ending’), and by the end of the decade E. Arnot Robertson dismissed the idea of sexual difference as redundant, albeit a concept to which contemporary cinema was slow to respond. Space therefore was negotiated for dissenting voices to be heard in more mainstream outlets such as Woman’s Hour and Picture Post, and the fact that these critics continued to find employment throughout the decade in competitive commercial environments attests to an audience for their views. Rather than seeing these voices as oppositional, however, they stand as evidence of how British society and culture was confronting gender change at this time. Through an examination of film writing we can see that there were a number of views in circulation about women, which often contradicted one another. Woman positioned its female readers as housewives and mothers with Lockhart’s film reviews focusing on domestic problems, whilst some of the writing for Picture Post and Woman’s Hour highlighted the importance of careers,

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suggested that women were not motivated by ‘love interest’, and that they may have had ‘manly tastes’. It was through these ambiguous and conflicting messages that the differing needs and interests of ‘women’ (differentiated not least by age, class and sexuality, for example) were being addressed. Robertson, de la Roche and Lockhart represent some of British society’s ‘noisy voices’ (to use Elizabeth Wilson’s term) and writing them back into film history, as this chapter has done, is an important part of unravelling the myth of consensus on the position of women in the 1950s.

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chapter title

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Conclusion

Reconfiguring 1950s Femininity Across this study I have charted how British popular cinema engaged with, and responded to, the changing understandings of femininity that were shaping the social imaginary in the 1950s. My motivation for undertaking this study was the sense that only one story had been told about the cinematic femininities of this decade, and that there was a need to reassess the cinematic landscape to take account of the transition and instability that characterized gender roles in British society at this time. What has emerged from this study is a sense of how remarkably bold some popular cinema was. Across a range of films and genres a number of concerns are raised; should women give up work to look after children, what are the restrictions of married life, is employing women uneconomic, should women have sex before marriage and what are the consequences if they do? Equally a number of statements are articulated that seem incompatible with the mythological figure of the ‘happy housewife’; women’s friendships with other women are important, choosing marriage over a career is ‘dangerously romantic’, women are more than housekeepers, mothers and sex objects and, finally, male desires for biddable ‘controllable’ women are absurd. These concerns were articulated, with varying degrees of intensity, in films which appeared across the cultural map, ranging from lowbudget productions such as The Perfect Woman and Easy Money, minor ‘A’s like The Flesh is Weak, to more prestige productions such as A Town Like Alice and Madeleine. That space was found or negotiated across such a wide range of films (science fiction, contemporary comedy, war, crime, social-problem) illustrates the importance of casting the net as widely as possible. It also speaks of the unevenness with which the film industry engaged with new articulations of femininity. In the absence of any single genre or cycle of popular film-making which might be expected to confront, head-on, women’s needs and desires (as Gainsborough’s costume melodramas had done in the mid-1940s), the manner and the extent to which British cinema addressed women’s changing experiences and subjectivities was not predictable. Some of the more perceptive statements on contemporary gender relations

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can be readily attributed to women working within the film industry: Muriel Box, Wendy Toye, Anne Burnaby, and critics Catherine de la Roche and E. Arnot Robertson. This should not surprise us because women, at all times in history, have sought out ways to express their opinions. These films and critical writings should not be understood as oppositional texts – subversive voices from outside the mainstream – but rather as a part of the mainstream; evidence of how British cinema was engaging with, negotiating, and working through, social change as it related to femininity. To be commercially successful, cinematic representation had to negotiate – for the pleasures of the cinema audience – the shifts that were taking place in women’s roles in the material world. That many of these films were successful (Raising a Riot, A Town Like Alice, The Perfect Woman) whilst some were not (Young Wives’ Tale) indicates how and where British popular cinema connected with its audiences and women’s contemporary experiences. Rather than being a decade where popular cinema was hostile to femininity, an anodyne reflection of the gender conservatism widely thought prevalent in British society, popular cinema did, at times, imagine and construct femininities that were challenging, often ambiguous and contradictory, but frequently surprising. There are other stories to tell about the cinema of the decade, and other feminine figurations that need to be repositioned on the map of British film history. I hope that this study will act as a spur for others to undertake further research into this rich and varied topic.

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Notes Notes to Introduction 1 Tessa Perkins, ‘Two Weddings and Two Funerals: the Problem of the Post-War Woman’, in Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson (eds) Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War (Manchester, 1996) p. 265. 2 Andrew Marr, ‘Your History of Britain’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ magazine/decades/1950s Cherry Potter, ‘Frocks and Feminism’, http:// www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/jun/14/gender.film 3 Lynne Segal quoted in Claire Langhamer, ‘Adultery in Post-War England’, History Workshop Journal 62 (2006), p. 88. 4 Lindsay Anderson in Brian McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema (London, 1997), p. 9. Charles Barr, Ealing Studios (California, 1977), p. 146. 5 Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (London, 1992) p. 33. Sue Harper comments on the rigidity of female sexual stereotypes at this time, polarized between ‘an MoI reprise: a virtuous potential homemaker’ and a ‘Whorish Hussy … sexually hungry and stupid’ (Sue Harper, Women in British Cinema (London, 2000) p. 98). Harper does later explain that notwithstanding these stereotypes the ‘structure of the industry in the 1950s … [permitted] some liberal and challenging interpretations’ of females to emerge (p. 99). 6 Penny Summerfield, ‘Approaches to Women and Social Change in the Second World War’, in Brian Brivati and Harriet Jones (eds) What Difference Did the War Make? (London, 1993), pp. 63–79. 7 Angela Partington, ‘The Designer Housewife in the 1950s’, in Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham (eds) A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design (London, 1989), p. 212. 8 Birmingham Feminist History Group (BFHG), ‘Feminism as Femininity in the Nineteen-Fifties?’, Feminist Review 3 (1979), pp. 54–8. 9 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester, 1998), pp. 199–249. 10 Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880 (Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2000), p. 166. 11 Claire Langhamer, ‘The Meaning of Home in Postwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History 40 (2005), p. 356.

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12 Alison Light, ‘Writing Fictions: Femininity and the 1950s’, in Jean Radford (ed) The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction (London, 1986), p. 142. 13 Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (London, 2000), p. 29. 14 Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, p. 159. 15 Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain 1945–1968 (London, 1980), p. 3. 16 I would direct readers to the scholarly accounts of the subject provided by Elizabeth Wilson (1980), Penny Summerfield (1993 & 1998), Denise Riley (1979) and others, whose work has broadened my own understanding of the period. 17 Vera Brittain (1953) quoted in Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 164. 18 Light, ‘Writing Fictions’, p. 141. 19 Martin Pugh, ‘The Nadir of British Feminism 1945–1959?’, in Martin Pugh (ed) Women and the Woman’s Movement in Britain (London, 1992), p. 295. 20 Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (London, 1977), p. 151. 21 Quoted in Jane Lewis, ‘Marriage’, in Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (ed) Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow, Essex, 2001), p. 80. 22 Lewis, ‘Marriage’, p. 73. 23 For divorce statistics and general commentary see Janet Finch and Penny Summerfield, ‘Social Reconstruction and the Emergence of Companionate Marriage, 1945–59’, in David Clark (ed) Marriage, Domestic Life and Social Change (London, 1991), p. 26. 24 John Bowlby, Child Care and the Growth of Love (Middlesex, 1965), p. 240. D. W. Winnicott, quoted in BFHG, ‘Feminism as Femininity’, p. 56. 25 BFHG, ‘Feminism as Femininity’, p. 54. 26 John Newsom (1948) quoted in Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 33. 27 Quoted in Wilson, Women and the Welfare State, p. 82. 28 As Rachel Moseley has demonstrated in her research on post-war television cookery programmes, many of these were based on the assumption that a generation of young women had missed out on acquiring household management skills as a result of the war, and that they also needed education in how to operate new technologies such as pressure cookers and how to become ‘responsible’ consumers (Rachel Moseley, ‘Reconstructing Early Television for Women in Britain: Marguerite Patten, Television Cookery and Post-War British Femininity’, in Stacy Gillis and Joanne Hollows (eds) Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture (London, 2009) pp. 18–20). 29 Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, pp. 43–4. 30 Pugh, ‘The Nadir of British Feminism’, pp. 287–8. The proportion of women in employment aged 35–59 increased from 26 per cent in 1931

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

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to 43 per cent in 1951 (Langhamer, ‘The Meaning of Home in Postwar Britain’, p. 359). Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work (London, 1956), pp. 27–41. Whilst government reports and policies prioritized domesticity for women above all other roles, popular television was more in tune with the reality of women’s lives. Cookery programmes for example assumed that women had part-time jobs and the theme of the ‘working wife and mother’ was used to address female viewers (Moseley, ‘Reconstructing Early Television for Women’, p. 24). Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, pp. 87–8. Wilson, Women and the Welfare State, p. 66. Mary Macaulay, The Art of Marriage (London, 1952), p. 33. Helena Wright (1947) reprinted in Lesley A. Hall (ed) Outspoken Women: An Anthology of Women’s Writing on Sex, 1870–1969 (London, 2005), pp. 261–3. Harriett Gilbert, ‘Growing Pains’, in Liz Heron (ed) Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls growing up in the 50s (London, 1985), p. 54. Sylvia Syms in Brian McFarlane, (1997) An Autobiography of British Cinema (London, 1997), p. 549. Deborah Philips and Ian Haywood, Brave New Causes: Women in British Postwar Fictions (London, 1998), pp. 80–81. Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, pp. 22–5. Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds) Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–1964 (London, 1999), pp. 1–3. Conekin, Moments of Modernity, p. 20. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain, p. 166. Philip Corrigan, ‘Film Entertainment as Ideology and Pleasure: Towards a History of Audiences’, in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds) British Cinema History (New Jersey, 1983), p. 30. Mass Observation, ‘Why do they go to the Pictures?’, Mass Observation Reprint, Vol. 1 No. 19 (London: Mass Observation, November 1950), p. 1. Mass Observation, ‘Why do they go to the Pictures?’, p. 3. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford, 2003), p. 244. Harper and Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s, p. 247. T. Cauter and J. S. Downham, The Communication of Ideas: A Study of Contemporary Influences on Urban Life (London, 1954), p. 125. Harper and Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s, p. 247. Richard Maltby, ‘“A Brief Romantic Interlude”: Dick and Jane Go to 3½ Seconds of the Classical Hollywood Cinema’, in David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (eds) Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Wisconsin, 1996), p. 436. Maltby, ‘“A Brief Romantic Interlude”, p. 443. Vincent Porter, ‘Reviews’, Screen 42: 4 (Winter 2001), p. 408.

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54 Female tastes were not monolithic but were shaped by class and age. For example, older female cinema-goers preferred romantic ‘weepies’ such as Magnificent Obsession whilst younger women liked Audrey Hepburn and Doris Day vehicles (Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, ‘Cinema Audience Tastes in 1950s Britain’, Journal of Popular British Cinema 2 (1999), p. 74). 55 Despite recent claims to the contrary – the New Film History for example calls for attention to the ‘look and sound of the film’ – this remains an area that many film historians find notoriously difficult to engage with imaginatively (James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper (eds) The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches (Hampshire, 2007), p. 8). Further, British cinema of the 1950s has frequently been characterized by ‘literateness’ and ‘a poverty of visual style’ which has steered academic criticism away from mise-en-scène analysis (Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard (eds) British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration (Manchester, 2003), p. 5). It is for these reasons that mise-en-scène analysis is central to this study. 56 Philip Larkin famously characterized 1963 as the point at which ‘Sexual intercourse began … Between the end of the Chatterley ban, And the Beatles’ first LP’ (‘Annus Mirabilis’ (1967), in High Windows (London, 1979)). 57 Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 190. 58 Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 27. Notes to Chapter 1 1 Robert Jones, ‘The Boffin: A Stereotype of Scientists in Post-War British Films (1945–1970)’, Public Understanding of Science 6 (1997), p. 31. 2 Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945 (London, 1990), p. 21. 3 Becky Conekin, ‘The autobiography of a nation’: The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester, 2003), pp. 57–66. 4 George Orwell, ‘What Is Science?’ Tribune 26 October 1945. Rpt. in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: Volume IV, In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950 (London, 1968b), p. 11. 5 Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London, 2001), p. 212. 6 Conekin, ‘The autobiography of a nation’, p. 58. 7 George Orwell, ‘You and the Atom Bomb’ Tribune 19 October 1945. Rpt. in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: Volume IV, In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950 (London, 1968a), p. 6. 8 Deborah Philips and Ian Haywood, Brave New Causes: Women in British Postwar Fictions (London, 1998), pp. 25–6. 9 Philips and Haywood, Brave New Causes, pp. 25–6.

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10 Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton, New Jersey, 1991), p. 395. 11 Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (London, 2000), p. 60. 12 Steve Chibnall, ‘Alien Women: The Politics of Sexual Difference in British SF Pulp Cinema’, in I. Q. Hunter (ed) British Science Fiction Cinema (London, 1999), pp. 57–8. 13 Chibnall, ‘Alien Women’, pp. 57–8. 14 Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford, 2003), pp. 141–3. 15 Peter Hutchings, Terence Fisher (Manchester, 2001). 16 Sue Harper, ‘“A Dry and Tidy Place”: Visions of the Future in British Cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s’, (unpublished conference paper, XX IAMHIST Congress, 2003). 17 It is noteworthy that the design for The Perfect Woman was done by J. Elder Wills, whose later work in art direction for Hammer was so striking (Harper, ‘A Dry and Tidy Place’). 18 Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffman (1951) has the dancing doll as one of its three stories whilst Lubitsch’s Die Puppe (1919, The Doll) dramatized Hoffman’s story. 19 Lyn Phelan, ‘Artificial Women and Male Subjectivity in 42nd Street and Bride of Frankenstein’, Screen 41: 2 (2000), p. 162. 20 Phelan, ‘Artificial Women’, p. 162. 21 Phelan, ‘Artificial Women’, p. 162. 22 Melissa Hope Ditmore (ed) Encyclopaedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, Volume 1 (Connecticut, 2006), p. 19. 23 Mark Bould, ‘Imagining The Perfect Woman: On the Sparsity of SF Romantic Comedy’, (unpublished conference paper, Screen 2005). 24 Bould, ‘Imagining The Perfect Woman’. 25 Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality (London, 1985), p. 49. 26 Kuhn, The Power of the Image, p. 54. 27 George Orwell, ‘Pleasure Spots’ Tribune 11 January 1946. Rpt. in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: Volume IV, In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950 (London, 1968c), p. 81. 28 Young Wives’ Tale (1951) likewise dramatizes these concerns in its focus on a disgruntled husband who thinks his wife is excessively rational and compares her, pejoratively, to the ‘perfect machine’. 29 Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin, Texas, 1995), pp. 30–31. 30 ‘The Perfect Woman’. Rev. Kinematograph Weekly, 12 May 1949, p. 17. 31 ‘The Perfect Woman’. Rev. Picturegoer, 18 June 1949, p. 16 and Picturegoer, 19 November 1949, p. 7. 32 Letters Page, Picturegoer, 2 July 1949, p. 18.

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33 Kathy Davis, ‘Pygmalions in Plastic Surgery: Medical Stories, Masculine Stories’, in Janine Marchessault and Kim Sawchuk (eds) Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media (London, 2000), p. 110. 34 Davis, ‘Pygmalions in Plastic Surgery’, p. 105. The war had given recent impetus to plastic surgery through the need to reconstruct disfigured soldiers. In the post-war period men were the main recipients, with surgery for purely cosmetic reasons frowned upon as trivial. It is for this reason that the Blitz is used to legitimize Lily’s disfigurement. 35 Sigmund Freud (1919) ‘The Uncanny’, in Collected Papers Volume IV Trans. Joan Rivière (London, 1925), pp. 383–4. 36 Jonathan Rigby comments that Scott brought the Edith Head costumes for the film with her when she travelled from the US for filming, although I have no more detail on how Head came to design the costumes for the film. ‘Early Hammer’, Hammer Horror (5) 1995, p. 35. Head at this time had been nominated for an Academy Award for The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and later won for her costume designs for Sabina (1954). 37 Rachel Moseley, Growing up with Audrey Hepburn: Text, Audience, Resonance (Manchester, 2002), p. 36. 38 Moseley, Growing up with Audrey Hepburn, p. 37. 39 ‘Stolen Face’. Rev. Kinematograph Weekly, 23 April 1953, p. 24. Today’s Cinema quoted in Rigby, ‘Early Hammer’, p. 36. 40 Harper, ‘A Dry and Tidy Place’. Harper argues that these and other films engaged with the ‘world of plastic’ – a modern substance which drew a variety of responses in the 1950s. The films were trying to ‘think through what it meant to be modern – whether one could feel or act the same when one’s surroundings and living materials were utterly transformed’, and the facially impassive females were part of the process through which these film-makers engaged with the ‘unmarked, sterile surfaces of modernity’. 41 Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Wisconsin, 1989), p. 123. 42 Hutchings, Terence Fisher, p. 68. 43 Landy, British Genres, p. 409. 44 Hutchings, Terence Fisher, p. 68. 45 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), p. 85. 46 ‘Four Sided Triangle’. Rev. Picturegoer, 13 June, 1953. 47 ‘Bad Blonde: The Tragic Life of ’50s Starlet Barbara Payton’, http://www. filmfax.com/archives/bad_blonde/barbara_payton 48 Phelan, ‘Artificial Women’, p. 161. 49 See the ‘Mouse’ films discussed by Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, p. 60.

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Notes to Chapter 2 1 On the subject of British cinema and the theme of female choice in the post-war period see Tessa Perkins, ‘Two Weddings and Two Funerals: the Problem of the Post-War Woman’, in Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson (eds) Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War (Manchester, 1996), pp. 264–81; Sue Harper, Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (London, 2000); Christine Geraghty, ‘Post-War Choices and Feminine Possibilities’ in Ulrike Sieglhor (ed) Heroines Without Heroes: Female Identities in Post-War European Cinema 1945–51 (London, 2000), pp. 15–32. Other notable examples of this theme include Brief Encounter (1945), The Wicked Lady (1945), The Red Shoes (1948) and The Passionate Friends (1949). 2 Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939– 1948 (London, 1989), p. 107. 3 Murphy, Realism and Tinsel, p. 107. 4 Sue Aspinall, ‘Women, Realism and Reality in British Films, 1943–53’, in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds) British Cinema History (Totowa, New Jersey, 1983), p. 285. 5 Andrew Spicer, Film Noir (Essex, 2002), pp. 175, 202. 6 Harper, Women in British Cinema, p. 69. 7 Peter Wollen, ‘Riff-Raff Realism’, Sight and Sound (April 1998), p. 18. 8 Arthur Vesselo, ‘British Films of the Quarter’, Sight and Sound 16: 63 (Autumn 1947b), p. 120. Vesselo was in good company. The then President of the Board of Trade Harold Wilson addressed the House of Commons in June 1948 on the subject of film, commenting on the glut of ‘gangster, sadistic and psychological films’ which showcased, in his opinion, ‘diseased minds, schizophrenia, amnesia’. Quoted in Charles Barr, All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London, 1986), p. 14. 9 Murphy, Realism and Tinsel, p. 169. 10 Spicer, Film Noir, p. 183. 11 Spicer, Film Noir, pp. 183–4. 12 Leonard Mosley quoted in Bruce Babington, ‘“Queen of British Hearts”: Margaret Lockwood Revisited’, in Bruce Babington (ed) British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery (Manchester, 2001), p. 95. The Guardian and Time and Tide cited in Sue Aspinall and Robert Murphy, Gainsborough Melodrama (London, 1983), pp. 74–7. 13 Freda Bruce Lockhart, ‘Hungry Hill’, Rev. Woman, 15 February 1947. 14 Babington, British Stars and Stardom, p. 105. 15 Murphy, Realism and Tinsel, p. 107. 16 Babington, British Stars and Stardom, p. 104. 17 Bedelia press book, held at the BFI Library. Haffenden had achieved notable recognition for her flamboyant designs for Gainsborough’s costume melodramas.

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18 Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton, New Jersey, 1991), pp. 229–30. 19 Otto Pollak commented in his 1950 study on female criminality that ‘female murderers … resort to poison to a much higher degree than men’, their crimes more likely to be hidden because of misguided notions of ‘male gallantry’ with men less likely to bring complaints against women (Otto Pollak, The Criminality of Women (New York, 1961), pp. 3–4). Pollak’s approach to the subject of female criminality takes a numbers of methods such as physiology, socially prescribed behavioural roles and female ‘nature’ to justify his ‘findings’ which are grounded in what are a set of prejudices relating to woman and gender relations. 20 Ann Jones, Women Who Kill (London, 1991), p. xxii 21 Rebecca Stott, The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale (Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1992), p. viii. 22 Aspinall, ‘Women, Realism and Reality in British Films’, p. 284. 23 Geoffrey Macnab, Searching for Stars: Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema (London, 2000), p. 143. 24 Harper, Women in British Cinema, p. 70. 25 Harper, Women in British Cinema, p. 71. 26 Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York, 1991). Christine Gledhill, ‘Klute 1: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist Criticism’, in E. Ann Kaplan (ed) Women in Film Noir, rev. edn (London, 1998), pp. 20–34. Richard Dyer, ‘Resistance Through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda’, in Kaplan, Women in Film Noir, pp. 115–22. 27 Lockwood, for example, was famously chastised by her production company for appearing in public looking unglamorous and casually dressed (Babington, British Stars and Stardom, pp. 95–6). 28 See the Greta Gynt ‘micro jacket’ held at the BFI Library. 29 Greta Gynt in Eric Braun, ‘Rank’s Young Generation’, Films and Filming 20: 1 (October 1973), p. 34. 30 The Leader cited in ‘The Archive Presents … Greta Gynt’ in National Film Theatre programme, November 2000, pp. 50–52. Greta Gynt obituary, Times, 5 April 2000. R. Bergan, Greta Gynt obituary, Guardian, 5 April 2000. 31 Bergan, Guardian, 2000. 32 Arthur Vesselo, ‘British Films of the Quarter’, Sight and Sound 16: 62 (Summer 1947a), p. 77. 33 Murphy, Realism and Tinsel, p. 187; Spicer, Film Noir, p. 125. 34 Babington, British Stars and Stardom, p. 20. 35 Gledhill, ‘Klute 1’, pp. 30–31. 36 Andrew Spicer, Sydney Box (Manchester, 2006), p. 109. 37 ‘Shady Lady Spiv’ written by Vivian Ellis, sung by Greta Gynt. 38 Quoted in Spicer, Sydney Box, p. 100. 39 Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal, ‘Introduction’ in Andrew

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Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (eds) Play it Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes (California, 1998), p. 4. Dyer, ‘Resistance Through Charisma’, p. 121. Janey Place, ‘Women in Film Noir’, in Kaplan, Women in Film Noir, p. 56. Place, ‘Women in Film Noir’, p. 56. Spicer, Film Noir, p. 184. Dear Murderer press book, held at the BFI Library. The press book for Easy Money has a similar focus on Gynt’s ‘model’ status and foregrounds her association with stylish clothing. Harper, Women in British Cinema, p. 214. Spicer, Sydney Box, p. 125. Angela Martin, ‘Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over!’: The Central Woman of 40s Films Noirs’, in Kaplan, Women in Film Noir, pp. 208–9. Martin, ‘Gilda’, p. 209. Brian McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema (London, 1997), p. 562. Braun comments on Todd as being an actress often accused of ‘coldness in performance’ (‘Rank’s Young Generation’, p. 39) whilst Monthly Film Bulletin in their review of Madeleine state that ‘Ann Todd is, as usual, more than a trifle glacial’ (March 1950, p. 24). Brian McFarlane, The Encyclopedia of British Film (London, 2003), p. 670. Much scholarship has approached these two modes as opposing polarities but, as Alan Lovell has argued, ‘British cinema is often most exciting when restraint and excess interact with each other’, the classic example being Brief Encounter (1945). Alan Lovell, ‘The British Cinema: The Known Cinema?’, in Robert Murphy (ed) The British Cinema Book second edn (London, 2001), p. 202. As with Easy Money, Daybreak was produced by Sydney Box and coscripted by Sydney with Muriel Box. Spicer details how the film was radically cut by the censors who objected in particular to the violent lovemaking scenes between Frankie and Olaf (Sydney Box, p. 70). See Spicer’s account of how a replica houseboat was reconstructed at Riverside studios with synthetic fog used to both hide the studio walls and create the required atmosphere (Sydney Box, p. 69). James Maxfield quoted in ‘Introduction’, Kaplan, Women in Film Noir, p. 5. In its engagement with the ‘emotional, social and psychological’ problems of being a woman the film meets Basinger’s criteria of the ‘woman’s film’ (Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960 (London, 1994), p. 20). Because of the film’s connection with director David Lean, however, it is most often written about from an auteurist perspective, typically as a somewhat failed entry in the Lean

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canon. See Alain Silver and James Ursini, David Lean and His Films (Los Angeles, 1991) and Kevin Brownlow, David Lean: A Biography (1996). The story is based on a true case and Todd had previously performed the role in the play The Rest is Silence in 1944. The play departed from fact in portraying, without ambiguity, Madeleine murdering her lover. Conversely Lean’s film is true to the original verdict of the court. Doane, Femmes Fatales, p. 1. The film had a budget of £200,000 (almost double that of Easy Money) and was thus positioned towards the high end of production costs at this time; see Brian McFarlane, Lance Comfort (Manchester, 1999), p. 82. Its director Lance Comfort (who had made Bedelia two years earlier) produced a number of interesting melodramas (including Great Day, 1945, Temptation Harbour, 1947 and Hatter’s Castle, 1941) and was skilled at creating obsessive or ruined characters facing extreme pressures. It was one of McKenna’s first screen roles and as an unknown actress there was no sense of a ‘star persona’ being brought to bear on the character. Ruth Barton, Irish National Cinema (London, 2004), p. 80. Rachel Moseley, ‘A Landscape of Desire: Cornwall as Romantic Setting in Love Story and Ladies in Lavender’, in Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams (eds) British Women’s Cinema (London, 2009). Miranda (1948) and Love Story (1944), for example, both make imaginative use of their Cornish settings. Doane, Femmes Fatales, p. 2. See the Daughter of Darkness press book, held at the BFI Library. Doane, Femmes Fatales, p. 2. Daughter of Darkness press book. ‘Daughter of Darkness’. Rev. Times, 28 January 1948. McFarlane, Lance Comfort, p. 86. Gledhill, ‘Klute 1’, p. 29. Stott, The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale, p. 68. Gledhill, ‘Klute 1’, p. 29. Doane, Femmes Fatales, p. 3. British cinema also produced a small cycle of ‘Hammer-hybrids’ in the noir vein. Made by Hammer studios under a deal with an American company Lippert Productions, these films cast Hollywood players in the main roles whilst the supporting actors and studio staff were British. Films such as The Last Page (1952) and The House Across the Lake (1954) explicitly rework themes from American film noir and have a style and tone that is very different from the films I have discussed here. See Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford, 2003), pp. 141–3.

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Notes to Chapter 3 1 Pat Thane has argued that ‘[t]he 1930s to the 1950s was the golden age, indeed the only age, of the near universal, stable, long-lasting marriage, often considered the normality from which we have since departed’. Pat Thane, ‘Family Life and “Normality” in Postwar British Culture’, in Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (eds) Life After Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and the 1950s (Cambridge, 2003), p. 198. 2 Annette Kuhn, ‘Mandy and Possibility’, Screen 33: 3 (1992), pp. 233– 43 and John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema, 1956–1963 (London, 1986). 3 Claire Langhamer, ‘The Meaning of Home in Postwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History 40 (2005), p. 345. 4 Quoted in Langhamer, ‘The Meaning of Home in Postwar Britain’, p. 345. Langhamer is right to distinguish carefully between what was actually new about how the post-war home was imagined and experienced (affluence, an intensified desire for ‘domestic stability’), and the ways in which it realized ‘dreams and aspirations first formulated in the 1930s’ and was shaped by the existing, long-established trend of smaller family sizes (p. 342). 5 Penny Summerfield, ‘Women in Britain since 1945: Companionate Marriage and the Double Burden’, in James Obelkevich and Peter Catterall (eds) Understanding Post-War British Society (London, 1994), p. 58. 6 Quoted in Summerfield, ‘Women in Britain since 1945’, p. 59. 7 Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain 1945–1968 (London, 1980), p. 89. 8 Janice Winship, ‘Woman Becomes an “Individual” – Femininity and Consumption in Women’s Magazines 1954–69’, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (University of Birmingham), Stencilled Occasional Paper, 65 (1981), p. 18. 9 Deborah Philips and Ian Haywood, Brave New Causes: Women in British Postwar Fictions (London, 1998), p. 87. 10 Mary Macaulay, The Art of Marriage (London, 1952), p. 2. 11 Birmingham Feminist History Group (BFHG), ‘Feminism as Femininity in the Nineteen-Fifties?’, Feminist Review 3 (1979), pp. 57–9. 12 Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 91. 13 BFHG, ‘Feminism as Femininity’, p. 49. 14 Summerfield, ‘Women in Britain since 1945’, p. 60. 15 Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 80. 16 Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 21. 17 Quoted in Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 19. 18 Summerfield, ‘Women in Britain since 1945’, p. 61. 19 A number of factors contributed to this decline: the war-time demand for women as typists and clerks, the post-war increase in the school

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leaving age, and women’s marked preference for work other than personal service. See Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service (London, 2007), p. 313. Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, pp. 21–2. Langhamer, ‘The Meaning of Home in Postwar Britain’, p. 360. Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 30. Winship, ‘Woman Becomes an “Individual”’, p. 17. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London, 1994), pp. 51–2. Samuel, Theatres of Memory, pp. 48–55. ‘Mechanised’. Picture Post, 18 March 1950, pp. 48–55. Langhamer, ‘The Meaning of Home in Postwar Britain’, p. 348. Langhamer, ‘The Meaning of Home in Postwar Britain’, p. 351. Paul Addison, Now the War is Over: A Social History of Britain 1945–51 (London, 1985), p. 57. Susan Haywood, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, second edn (London, 2000), p. 73. Indeed, as Vincent Porter has argued, in the absence of melodrama, it was through comedies and war films that audiences absorbed the emerging values of the post-war consensus. Vincent Porter, ‘The Hegemonic Turn: Film Comedies in 1950s Britain’, Journal of Popular British Cinema 4 (2001), p. 81. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford, 2003), p. 107. Andrew Spicer, ‘The “other war”: Subversive Images of the Second World War in Service Comedies’, in Steven Caunce, Ewa Mazierska, Susan Sydney-Smith, John K. Walton (eds) Relocating Britishness (Manchester, 2004), p. 167. Spicer, ‘The “other war”’, pp. 167–82. Raymond Durgnant, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London, 1970), p. 181. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System (Australia & New Zealand, 1981), p. 155. Cited in Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, Affairs to Remember: The Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes (Manchester, 1989), p. 39. Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (London, 2007), p. 13. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981), p. 2. Babington and Evans, Affairs to Remember, p. 24. Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (London, 2000), p. 164. Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, p. 164. Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, p. 159. Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity on Popular British Cinema (London, 2001), p. 93.

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45 The action in Father’s Doing Fine (1952) centres on an imminent birth and was scripted by Anne Burnaby. 46 Harper and Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s, p. 292. 47 Babington and Evans, Affairs to Remember, p. 14. 48 Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton, New Jersey, 1991), p. 384. 49 Justine Lloyd and Lesley Johnson, ‘The Three Faces of Eve: The Post-War Housewife, Melodrama, and Home’, Feminist Media Studies 3: 1 (2003), p. 21. 50 Films and Filming quoted in Spicer, Typical Men, p. 40. 51 Margaret Hinxman, ‘Kenneth More – A Star By Public Demand’, Picturegoer, (28 January, 1956), pp. 14–15. 52 The film would have played very differently with another actor, for example the more ‘feminized’ Dirk Bogarde, (alternatively petulant/ dreamy) in the lead role. 53 Porter, ‘The Hegemonic Turn’, pp. 480–81. 54 ‘Raising a Riot’. Rev. Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1955, p. 53. ‘Raising a Riot’. Rev. Kinematograph Weekly, 24 February 1955, pp. 22–3. 55 Acceptable household duties for men included ‘mending and fixing, carrying the coal, chopping firewood … time-limited rather than expansive responsibilities’. Langhamer, ‘The Meaning of Home in Postwar Britain’, p. 356. 56 Babington and Evans, Affairs to Remember, p. 24. 57 Harper and Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s, p. 160. 58 Schatz, Hollywood Genres, p. 29. 59 See Cavell on Adam’s Rib (1949) in Pursuits of Happiness, p. 191. 60 See Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 71. Despite popular support in the post-war period for divorce to be made available on the basis of ‘irretrievable breakdown’, it wasn’t available in England until 1969. Claire Langhamer, ‘Adultery in Post-war England’, History Workshop Journal 62 (2006), pp. 94–5. 61 Langhamer, ‘Adultery in Post-war England’, p. 96. 62 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 191. 63 The idea of role-playing in the film is compounded by Tony assuming the surname ‘Rappello’ rather than his real ‘English’ name Robinson on the basis that no one would publish music attributed to such a common everyday name as Robinson. 64 Spicer, Typical Men, p. 80. 65 Sue Harper, Women in British Cinema (London, 2000), p. 98. 66 Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, p. 174. 67 Quoted in Harper, Women in British Cinema, p. 194. 68 Steve Chibnall, J. Lee Thompson (Manchester, 2000), p. 53. 69 Harper and Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s, p. 82. 70 One of the ‘exploitation angles’ imagined by the film’s press book for promoting the film was publicity tied to building societies and estate agents, suggesting that audiences could be reached through exploiting

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this common theme (Young Wives’ Tale press book, held at the BFI Library). Inadequate housing and the acute shortage of domestic space recurs in other British films that deal with the trials and tribulations of young couples beginning married life. In For Better, For Worse (1954), for example, the young couple rent a ‘flat’ (comprising one room, 16 by 10 foot) from an imperious housing agent who informs them that there is fierce competition for the property. There is no question that childcare is the woman’s responsibility and that Mary’s entry into, and participation in, the professions is on the same basis as a man’s i.e. childless. It is in this respect that she is treated as man’s ‘equal’. Brian McFarlane, The Encyclopedia of British Film (London, 2003), p. 116. Quoted in Langhamer, ‘The Meaning of Home in Postwar Britain’, p. 360. Quoted in Jackie Byars, All That Hollywood Allows: Re-reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama (London, 1991), p. 75. Quoted in Byars, All That Hollywood Allows, p. 75. Babington and Evans, Affairs to Remember, p. 40. Babington and Evans, Affairs to Remember, p. 41. Babington and Evans, Affairs to Remember, p. 42. Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, p. 164. ‘Young Wives’ Tale’. Rev. Picture Show 10 November 1951. ‘Young Wives’ Tale’. Rev. Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1951, p. 300. Vincent Porter, ‘The Robert Clark Account: films released in Britain by Associated British Pictures, British Lion, MGM, and Warner Bros., 1946–1957’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20: 4 (2000), p. 484. As actors playing a married couple in a television series the film highlights the discrepancy between cultural constructions of family preferred by the television producers (bland, harmonious) and the reality of married life (noisy, argumentative), which is preferred by the television audience. The creative potential of housework, as explored by Angela Partington in her study of post-war housewives, is not explored here where creativity for artists finds expression only in the public realm. Angela Partington, ‘The Designer Housewife in the 1950s’, in Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham (eds) A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design (London, 1989). Muriel Box’s 1957 film The Truth About Women explicitly dramatized this issue through the figure of a promising female painter who abandons her burgeoning career to become a wife and mother, her later attempts at painting bearing witness only to her children’s interruptions to her artistic endeavours.

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Notes to Chapter 4 1 Virginia McKenna in Brian McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema (London, 1997), p. 382. 2 Yvonne Tasker, Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Culture (London, 1998), p. 139. 3 Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (New York, 1986), p. 224. 4 I am grateful to Sue Harper for this example of how the female group film responds to social circumstance. 5 Maria LaPlace, ‘Producing and Consuming the Woman’s Film: Discursive Struggle in Now, Voyager’, in Christine Gledhill (ed) Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London, 1987), p. 139. 6 Britain’s established tradition of episodic, portmanteau or omnibus films, ‘short story compendiums … where a number of personal narratives are presented, generally with some linking thread’ are well suited to ensemble casts (Brian McFarlane, The Encyclopedia of British Film (London, 2003)). In contrast, Levy argues that Hollywood stars are typically advised to eschew ensemble films as traditionally they rarely garner industry prizes for actors (Emanuel Levy, All About Oscar: The History & Politics of the Academy Award (New York, 2003)). 7 Very occasionally women were permitted a space in the elite male group and proved themselves to be equal to the males. Ice Cold in Alex (1958) and Operation Amsterdam (1958) are two notable examples, although the women introduce elements of narrative trouble in the form of romance and the potential for ‘feminine’ duplicity. 8 Robert Murphy, British Cinema and the Second World War (London, 2000), p. 232. Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (London, 2000), p. 168. 9 John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963 (London, 1986), p. 67. 10 Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880 (Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2000), p. 152. 11 See Andrew Spicer on the subject of the Box’s ‘topicals’, of which Easy Money (discussed in Chapter Two) also featured. Andrew Spicer, Sydney Box (Manchester, 2006), p. 108. Muriel and Sidney Box were keen to collaborate with Scotland Yard to ensure the film was a realistic portrayal of the life of women police officers but the Yard were extremely reluctant and obstructive because they ‘feared the film’s feminism’ (Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford, 2003), p. 160). 12 I gratefully acknowledge the observations of Justine Ashby on this point. 13 Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, p. 149.

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14 ‘Street Corner’. Rev. Daily Herald (13 March 1953), quoted in Spicer, Sydney Box, p. 153. 15 Spicer, Sydney Box, p. 153. 16 Richard Maltby, ‘“A Brief Romantic Interlude”: Dick and Jane Go to 3½ Seconds of the Classical Hollywood Cinema’, in David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (eds) Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Wisconsin, (1996), pp. 434–59). 17 Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London, 1994), p. 171. 18 ‘The Weak and the Wicked’. Rev. Kinematograph Weekly, 14 January 1954, p. 19. 19 A Town Like Alice press book, held at the BFI Library. 20 Kinematograph Weekly, 7 June 1956, p. 31. 21 Harper and Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s, p. 252. 22 Basinger, The World War II Combat Film, p. 75. 23 Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, p. 199. 24 An important contrast is drawn between Jean and Ellen, who’s described as ‘pretty quick on the uptake’. Jean is propositioned by a young Japanese officer, who offers her cigarettes and the suggestion of an ‘easy life’ in exchange for sex. Jean refuses but Ellen accepts and leaves the group. The scene suggests that single young women are either potential wives and mothers, or whores. Ellen is not shown caring for any of the children and, though she readily shares her medicines, she is predominantly defined by a sexuality that is, at best, tolerated by the other women. 25 The scene is not without precedent in British cinema. In 2,000 Women, a female-group film from 1944, a similar female bathing scene is used and is discussed in some detail by Babington, who argues that ultimately voyeurism is ‘demoted to the margins’ (Bruce Babington, Launder and Gilliat (Manchester, 2002), p. 76). Conversely in Alice, fragments of the female body (faces, lower legs, shoulders) are shown in close-up and medium shot. The camera is in this sense intrusive, although the scene as a whole is interspersed with shots of the children playing in the garden and the baby being washed, so that bathing takes its place alongside other domestic activities. 26 Josephine Dolan and Sarah Street, ‘“20 million people can’t be wrong”: Anna Neagle and Popular British Stardom’, in Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams (eds) British Women’s Cinema (London, 2009). 27 Whilst scenes of dressing and undressing in prison and the linking to public and private identities are found in male prison films (Joseph Losey’s The Criminal, 1960, is a good example of the male prisoner film with scenes of ‘dressing’), there is a more prolonged scrutiny of the female body in the woman-in-prison genre which suggests that feminine identity is more closely aligned with the body and physical appearance for women. 28 Rachel Moseley, Growing up with Audrey Hepburn: Text, Audience, Resonance (Manchester, 2002), p. 36.

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29 ‘The Weak and the Wicked’. Rev. in Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, p. 183. 30 Anne Morey, ‘The Judge Called Me An Accessory: Women Prison Films, 1950–1962’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 23: 2 (1995), p. 80. 31 Morey, ‘The Judge Called Me An Accessory’, p. 81. 32 Judith Mayne, Framed: Lesbians, Feminists and Media Culture (Minnesota, 2000), p. 127. 33 Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton, 1991). Steve Chibnall, J. Lee Thompson (Manchester, 2000). Melanie Williams, ‘Women in Prison and Women in Dressing Gowns: Rediscovering the 1950s films of J. Lee Thompson’, Journal of Gender Studies 11: 1 (2002). 34 Landy, British Genres, p. 455. 35 Chibnall, J. Lee Thompson, p. 66. 36 Tasker, Working Girls, p. 152. 37 Mayne, Framed, p. 118. 38 Alison Oram, Her Husband Was A Woman: Women’s Gender Crossing in Modern British Popular Culture (London, 2007), p. 138. 39 Alison Oram, ‘Lesbian Identities’ (unpublished conference paper, ‘Revisiting the Fifties’, Leeds Metropolitan University, 2008). Notes to Chapter 5 1 Sir John Wolfenden, Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (London, 1957). 2 See Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation (London, 1993) and John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema, 1956–1963 (London, 1986). The main exception to this critical neglect is Chadder’s article, which discusses the films in relation to the post-war cycle of British crime films and their criminalization of femininity (Viv Chadder, ‘The Higher Heel: Women and the Post-War British Crime Film’, in Steve Chibnall and Richard Murphy (eds) British Crime Cinema (London, 1999), pp. 66–80). This chapter is thus indebted to Chadder’s article but shifts the focus to consider the prostitute figure in relation to wider debates concerning female sexuality and modernity in the 1950s. 3 Chaffey enjoyed later success in Hollywood with Jason and the Argonauts (1963), whilst Stross produced, amongst other films, The Leather Boys (1963), one of British cinema’s more sympathetic treatments of a gay male theme. The press book for Flesh trumpets the fact that Stross took out a £20,000 insurance policy against recriminations from those involved in organized crime in London, whilst during the film’s production an interview with Stross in the trade magazine Kinematograph Weekly presents him as a controversial figure who often attracted justifiable criticism (Peter Evans, ‘Stross Defends His Social Document’, Studio Round-Up, Kinematograph Weekly, 21 March 1957).

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4 Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford, 2003) p. 221. 5 Kinematograph Weekly, 21 March 1957 and 25 July 1957, p. 21. 6 Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1957, p. 114. 7 Kinematograph Weekly quoted in Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, p. 192 and Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1959, p. 35. 8 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966). 9 David Trotter, Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction (Oxford, 2000). 10 Alfred Charles Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (both New York, 1948 and 1953). 11 Reproduced in Liz Stanley, Sex Surveyed, 1949–1994: From Mass Observation’s ‘Little Kinsey’ to the National Survey and the Hite Reports (London, 1995). 12 Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880 (Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2000), p. 156. 13 Harry Hopkins, The New Look: A Social History of the Forties and Fifties in Britain (London, 1963), p. 207. 14 Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs (London, 1969), p. 43. 15 Birmingham Feminist History Group, ‘Feminism as Femininity in the Nineteen-Fifties?’, Feminist Review 3 (1979), p. 60. 16 Booker, The Neophiliacs, p. 191. 17 Other infamous prosecution cases include those against Donald McGill’s ‘saucy postcards’, an item which had been an integral feature of the British seaside holiday for many decades (Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change, p. 166). 18 Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to The Beatles (London, 2006), p. xxi. 19 Carol Smart, ‘Law and the Control of Women’s Sexuality: The Case of the 1950s’, in Bridget Hutter and Gillian Williams (eds) Controlling Women: The Normal and the Deviant (London, 1981), p. 48. 20 Smart, ‘Law and the Control of Women’s Sexuality’, p. 48. It is for this reason that attitudes towards adultery hardened at this time as extramarital sex was an affront to the companionate marriage where sex was increasingly seen as an expression of love (see Claire Langhamer, ‘Adultery in Post-War England’, History Workshop Journal 62 (2006), p. 88). 21 In Stanley, Sex Surveyed, pp. 143–53. Moral disapproval was also ‘tempered with humanitarian feeling’ but more especially for the male client whose ‘masculine human nature’ was called upon to explain the continued existence of prostitution (in Stanley, p. 152). 22 In Stanley, Sex Surveyed, p. 150. 23 British Social Biology Council, Women of the Streets: A Sociological Study of the Common Prostitute (London, 1955). 24 Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London, 1989), p. 240.

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25 Joanna Phoenix, Making Sense of Prostitution (Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2001), pp. 25–26. 26 Wolfenden Report, p. 20. 27 Wolfenden Report, p. 80. 28 Wolfenden Report, p. 87. 29 Phoenix, Making Sense of Prostitution, pp. 25–6. 30 Wolfenden Report, p. 79. This approach to the prostitute shares many similarities with the biological discourses which are employed to explain the female criminal in the post-war period. For further discussion see Carol Smart, Women, Crime and Criminology: A Feminist Critique (London, 1976) and Frances Heidensohn, Women and Crime (Hampshire, 1985). One of the recommendations of the Committee was that ‘research into the aetiology of prostitution should be undertaken’. Further, powers were extended to the courts to remand women, on the occasion of their first or second conviction, for a ‘social or medical report’ which might include a ‘medical or psychiatric examination’ in an attempt to identify the ‘personal problems’ that led women to prostitution and strategies that could be employed to dissuade her from it (Wolfenden Report, pp. 93–98). The Committee evokes a medical discourse that sees prostitution as a disease, one that is suffered by certain individual women, and caused by biological and psychological – not economic – factors. 31 Eustace Chesser, Live and Let Live: the Moral of the Wolfenden Report (London, 1958), p. 91. 32 Sarah Leahy, Casque d’or (London, 2007), pp. 25–6. 33 Leahy, Casque d’or, p. 76. 34 Danielle Hipkins, ‘“I Don’t Want to Die”: Prostitution and Narrative Disruption in Visconti’s Rocco e I suoi fratelli’, in Penelope Morris (ed) Women in Italy, 1945–1960: An Interdisciplinary Study (Hampshire, 2006), p. 195. 35 Elizabeth Taylor’s performance in Butterfield 8 (1960) is the breakthrough role. 36 Marcia Landy, ‘Swinging Femininity, 1960s Transnational Style’, in Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams (eds) British Women’s Cinema (London, 2009). 37 Smart, ‘Law and the Control of Women’s Sexuality’, p. 50. In both cases the women take their first steps towards prostitution in a coffee bar where the Gaggia espresso machine dominates the mise-en-scéne. The coffee bar occupied a central place in British cultural life by the second half of the 1950s. Associated with youth and affluence, they represented an ‘ideal of modernity and cosmopolitanism’ that stood at odds with British austerity and conservatism (Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, p. 142). Within the cultural consciousness these were exotic ‘transgressive’ spaces which simultaneously signalled allure and danger. 38 Cate Haste, Rules of Desire: Sex in Britain, World War I to the Present (London, 1992). 39 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 4.

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Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 35. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 38. Haste, Rules of Desire, p. 160. Haste, Rules of Desire, p. 160. Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (London, 1955), p. 96. Gorer’s survey of English society was drawn from the completed questionnaires of 10,000 respondents. Gorer, Exploring English Character, p. 98. From 69–95 per cent of women had experienced heterosexual petting by the age of 18, with around a quarter of those women experiencing orgasm (Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female pp. 233–5). Fifty per cent of women married by the age of 20 had experience of pre-marital coitus, with the majority of this taking place in the year prior to marriage (Kinsey, p. 287). Cited in Haste, Rules of Desire, p. 159. Langhamer, ‘Adultery in Post-War England’, p. 88. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 163. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 38. Kinematograph Weekly, August 8, 1957. Kinematograph Weekly, August 22, 1957. Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London, 1970), p. 195. Kinematograph Weekly, 25 July 1957. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, 1991), p. 140. Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (London, 2000), pp. 22–5. Harper and Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s, p. 271. Harper and Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s, p. 271. Trotter, Cooking with Mud, p. 8. Trotter, Cooking with Mud, p. 5. Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London, 1971), p. 2. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 5. Winnicott quoted in Michael Jacobs, D. W. Winnicott (London, 1995), p. 52. Trotter, Cooking with Mud, p. 30. Kinematograph Weekly quoted in Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, p. 192 Harper, Women in British Cinema (London, 2000), p. 114.

Notes to Chapter 6 1 Cardiff and Scannell quoted in Su Holmes, British TV & Film Culture in the 1950s: Coming to a TV Near You (Bristol, 2005), p. 56. 2 Antonia Lant (ed) with Ingrid Periz, Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema (London and New York, 2006), pp. 1–2.

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3 Lant, Red Velvet Seat, p. 380. 4 Meaghan Morris argues that reviewing is based on the assumption that the reader hasn’t seen the film and that the film is therefore open and incomplete (the reviewer can’t reveal the ending for example) whilst criticism is retrospective, assumes the reader has seen or will see the film, and deals with a film that is closed (Meaghan Morris, The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (London, 1988), pp. 117–18). Some types of writing more readily fit this distinction than others, reviews for Woman for example, whilst I find that the broadcast scripts for Woman’s Hour blur the boundaries. It hasn’t been necessary or productive for the purposes of this chapter to retain a firm distinction between reviewing and criticism. 5 The survey was undertaken by Kinematograph Weekly in October 1945. See Philip Corrigan, ‘Film Entertainment as Ideology and Pleasure: Towards a History of Audiences’, in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds) British Cinema History (New Jersey, 1983) pp. 24–35. Whilst Kine’s status as the cinema manager’s trade journal indicates that the survey was not addressed at the general public, its readership illustrates how critics are positioned within the extra-cinematic relays by which films are mediated to audiences. Other studies claimed that 69 per cent of the 100,000 people surveyed through the Granada theatre chain in 1947 reported listening to BBC radio programmes on films (Corrigan, p. 31). 6 Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, second edn (Oxford, 2003), p. 493. 7 Lant, Red Velvet Seat, p. 453. 8 Constructing women’s film history often relies on unconventional and widely dispersed sources because women’s paths through the film industry were often diverse. De la Roche, for example, moved through a number of roles, first as a researcher at Ealing, then as Films Officer for the Soviet Relations Division of the MoI, before becoming a freelance journalist in the UK and then emigrating to New Zealand in 1959. Traces of her work are housed across a number of archives including the Colindale library, the BBC’s archive at Caversham, the BFI and the National Library of New Zealand. 9 Janice Winship, ‘Femininity and Women’s Magazines, a case study of Woman’s Own – “First in Britain for Women’’’, in Open University Unit 6, The Changing Experience of Women (Milton Keynes, 1983) p. 5. 10 Vincent Porter makes the point that the occasional cinema-goers, whose attendance could make a film really popular, would not visit the cinema often enough to catch trailers and would therefore be more reliant on poster advertisements and music from the film’s soundtrack, played on the radio, to make their selection (Vincent Porter, ‘The Robert Clark Account: Films Released in Britain by Associated British Pictures, British Lion, MGM, and Warner Bros., 1946–1957’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20: 4 (2000), p. 481). Clearly film reviews

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12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

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in magazines and film discussions on the radio and television (as well as word of mouth) would have played a role in persuading this group of cinema-goers to view certain films. It is not the case that men completely failed to engage with the subject of women in film. Dick Richards for example, a feature writer for Picturegoer, commented in 1955 on the lack of female roles in British cinema. See Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (London, 2000), p. 159. His comments were addressed towards Picturegoer’s female-dominated audience but male critics writing for specialist film publications such as Films and Filming were markedly less interested in exploring the subject of gender roles and relations in contemporary cinema (Geraghty, p. 159). What is noteworthy about de la Roche and Robertson is that they negotiated a space in Penguin Film Review to raise the issue of gender roles, addressing this subject to a specialist film audience – albeit one which was more used to reading articles on national cinemas (French, Italian, Soviet, Czech, Scandinavian) than single-issue political treatises. Holmes, British TV & Film Culture in the 1950s, pp. 52–9. Furthermore, the BBC provided a five-point framework within which the critics operated, the most important component of which, for the purposes of this discussion, is that the critics had latitude in selecting films for reviewing. Joy Leman has demonstrated how female critics were discriminated against by the BBC on both radio and television as they were thought to be inherently unsuitable to these mediums, their voices too high-pitched to give them real authority (quoted in Holmes, British TV & Film Culture, p. 60). Siân Nicholas observes that the BBC’s producer for the Variety Department Howard Thomas believed the radio microphone to be ‘a man’s instrument’, and he was not alone in this viewpoint (Siân Nicholas, ‘The People’s Radio: The BBC and its Audience, 1939–1945’, in Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill (eds) Millions Like Us? British Culture in the Second World War (Liverpool, 1999), p. 88). John Ellis, ‘Art, Culture and Quality, Terms for a Cinema in the Forties and Seventies’, Screen 19: 3 (1978), pp. 20–31. ‘In Which We Serve’. Rev. Woman, 2 January 1943, p. 14. Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960 (London, 1994), p. 20. Winship, ‘Femininity and Women’s Magazines’, p. 14. Janice Winship, ‘Woman Becomes an “Individual” – Femininity and Consumption in Women’s Magazines 1954–69’, (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies: University of Birmingham, 1981), p. 14. The format of the film section changed across the period and was supplemented with additional features such as ‘Pictures in the Making’ (by Lockhart) and ‘Star Gossip’ (written by Vivien Hill). ‘Brief Encounter’. Rev. Woman, 9 February 1946. ‘Perfect Strangers’. Rev. Woman, 6 October 1946.

notes

22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

197

‘Now Voyager’. Rev. Woman, 1 January 1944. ‘My Reputation’. Rev. Woman, 17 August 1946. ‘They Were Sisters’. Rev. Woman, 3 June 1945. Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (London, 1994), p. 142. Lockhart does review Fanny by Gaslight, Caravan and The Seventh Veil. Gaslight has pedigree because of Asquith’s direction, The Seventh Veil is a ‘realist’ melodrama whilst Caravan, a ‘true’ Gainsborough, is dismissed as ‘as obvious as can be’ (Woman, 8 June 1946). ‘So Bright the Flame’. Rev. Woman, 5 July 1952, p. 18. ‘Woman in a Dressing Gown’, broadcast script for The Critics, 13 October 1957 (BBC Written Archives Caversham [BBC WAC], The Critics microfiche). The Critics was structured around a four-way discussion between critics and a chairman. Participants were typically drawn from the arts (literature, painting and film) and each selected a play, novel or film for a round table discussion with each critic leading on their chosen item before opening the discussion up for wider debate. The film continues themes found in the comedies-of-marriage cycle where housework is only shown through processes which defamiliarize it and show it as ‘aberrant, unusual or strange … [with] housewives on film … troubled, lazy, bored, or mad’ (Justine Lloyd and Lesley Johnson, ‘The Three Faces of Eve: The Post-War Housewife, Melodrama, and Home’, Feminist Media Studies 3: 1 (2003), p. 21). ‘Woman in a Dressing Gown’, Rev. Kinematograph Weekly, 26 September. 1957, p. 17. Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army (Manchester, 1997), p. 143. The film’s popularity with women is reflected in the fact that Woman ran a story in 1960, ‘Girl with the dressing gown mind’, about a housewife in her thirties who had ‘let herself go’ and in doing so endangered her marriage. Although the woman is positioned as culpable, a critique of domesticity is tentatively raised. (Winship, ‘Woman Becomes an “Individual”’, pp. 21–2). ‘Woman in a Dressing Gown’, broadcast script for BBC’s The Critics (BBC WAC, The Critics microfiche). ‘Woman in a Dressing Gown’. Catherine de la Roche, Performance (Palmerston North, New Zealand, 1988), p. 45. De la Roche, Performance, p. 45. De la Roche, Performance, p. 46. Catherine de la Roche, ‘The Mask of Realism’, Penguin Film Review 7 (Middlesex, England, 1948), pp. 37–9. De la Roche, ‘That “Feminine Angle”’, Penguin Film Review 8 (Middlesex, England, 1949), p. 27. De la Roche, ‘That “Feminine Angle”’, p. 31. De la Roche, ‘That “Feminine Angle”’, p. 30. De la Roche, ‘That “Feminine Angle”’, p. 31. De la Roche, ‘That “Feminine Angle”’, p. 32.

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52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

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De la Roche, ‘That Feminine Angle’, p. 32. De la Roche, ‘That “Feminine Angle”’, pp. 28–9. De la Roche, ‘That “Feminine Angle”’, p. 34. Ellis, ‘Art, Culture and Quality’, p. 19. Catherine de la Roche, ‘H. G. Wells and the Cinema’ (1949), script for the Central Office of Information (held at the BFI Special Collections). Catherine de la Roche, ‘Carol Reed’, script for the BBC’s Third Programme, broadcast 12 June 1948 (held at the BFI Special Collections). ‘Odd Man Out’. Rev. Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1947, p. 47. Richard Winnington, ‘Odd Man Out’. Rev. 1947 reprinted in Drawn and Quartered (London, 1949), pp. 78–9. Dilys Powell, ‘Odd Man Out’. Rev. 1947 reprinted in The Dilys Powell Film Reader (ed Christopher Cook) (Oxford, 1991), p. 9. Martin Shingler, ‘Interpreting All About Eve: A Study in Historical Reception’, in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds) Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences (London, 2001). Mark Glancy, ‘The Hollywood Woman’s Film and British Audiences: A Case Study of Bette Davis and Now, Voyager (1942)’, in Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams (eds) British Women’s Cinema (London, 2009). Shingler, ‘Interpreting All About Eve’, p. 3. ‘All About Eve’. Rev. Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1951, p. 199. C A Lejeune, ‘A Star at Eve’. Rev. The Observer, 10 December 1950, p. 6. Catherine de la Roche, ‘Davis Versus Eve’. Picture Post, 9 December 1950, p.18. Catherine de la Roche, private correspondence to Talks Department, 9 August 1948 (held at the BBC WAC, Catherine Cameron File I, 1941–49). De la Roche, ‘That “Feminine Angle”’, p. 27. Letter from David Wolfers (Talks Department) to de la Roche, 6 October 1948 (BBC WAC 04/HT/DW, in Catherine Cameron File I, 1941–49). Memo to David Wolfers from J. S., 20 September 1948 (BBC WAC, Talks, Catherine Cameron File I, 1941–49). Memo from R. E. Keen (Talks Department) to J. Quigley, 8 October 1951(BBC WAC R51/173/4, Catherine Cameron File II, 1950-59). Catherine de la Roche, private correspondence to Talks Department, 5 March 1949 (BBC WAC, Catherine Cameron File I, 1941–49). Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain 1945–1968 (London, 1980), p. 181. Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 181. Catherine de la Roche, private correspondence to Talks Department, 23 March 1949 (BBC WAC, Catherine Cameron File I, 1941–49). There is more work to be done on this subject and the expansion of the BFI Education programme in the 1950s, work which has been started by Dupin (Christophe Dupin, ‘The Post War Transformation of the British Film Institute and its Impact on the Development of a National Film Culture in Britain’, Screen 47: 4 (2006), p. 443–51).

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66 Robertson, broadcast script for This Week’s Films, 22 September 1946 (BBC WAC, This Week’s Films microfiche). In the subsequent court case MGM accused Robertson of producing ‘witticisms not criticisms’ and objected to her reviewing on the basis of its ‘intolerable flippancy’ (ToDay’s Cinema, 16 July 1947, p. 46). Robertson won her initial case (and was awarded £1,500 damages), then lost on appeal and her own counterappeal failed. The BBC defended their use of Robertson, not least because succumbing to external pressure for censorship would have impinged on their editorial policy of independence. 67 E. Arnot Robertson, ‘Woman and the Film’, Penguin Film Review 3 (Middlesex, England, 1947), p. 32. 68 Robertson, ‘Woman and the Film’, pp. 32–3. 69 See D. W. Winnicott’s focus on ‘the ordinary devoted mother’, for example (Birmingham Feminist History Group, ‘Feminism as Femininity in the Nineteen-Fifties?’, Feminist Review 3 (1979), p. 56). 70 Reviewing Mildred Pierce for This Week’s Films on 28 April 1946 Robertson opened the review with ‘the patter of odious little feet resounds through the new pictures this week’, and went on to describe the film as ‘a tale of fruitless self-sacrifice’. The review is characteristically Robertson in its style of amused sarcasm and her approach to the subject matter stands as a direct challenge to the dominant rhetoric of ‘mother-love’ (BBC WAC, This Week’s Films microfiche). 71 Robertson, ‘A Woman’s Film’, broadcast script for Woman’s Hour, 13 May 1959 (BBC WAC, Woman’s Hour microfiche). 72 De la Roche, ‘That “Feminine Angle”’, p. 27. 73 Robertson, ‘A Woman’s Film’. 74 Robertson, ‘A Woman’s Film’. 75 Robertson, ‘A Woman’s Film’.

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Selective Filmography This filmography lists alphabetically a select number of British featurelength films where women and the concerns of femininity are central to the narrative. Periodisation covers the years from 1945 to the early 1960s (see Introduction). * Indicates women’s contribution. An Alligator Named Daisy (1955), director J. Lee Thompson, producer Raymond Stross. Cast: Diana Dors, Donald Sinden, Jean Carson. *Costumes Yvonne Caffin. Bedelia (1946), director Lance Comfort, producer Isadore Goldsmith (*novel Vera Caspary). Cast: Margaret Lockwood, Anne Crawford, Ian Hunter. *Costumes Elizabeth Haffenden. The Belles of St Trinian’s (1954), director Frank Launder, producer Frank Launder, Sidney Gilliat. Cast: George Cole, Alastair Sim, Joyce Grenfell. *Editor Thelma Connell. The Brothers (1947) director David MacDonald, producer Sydney Box (novel L. A. G. Strong). Cast: Patricia Roc, Maxwell Reed, Finlay Currie. *Coscreenwriter Muriel Box. Carve Her Name With Pride (1958), director Lewis Gilbert, producer Daniel M. Angel (novel R. J. Minney). Cast: Virginia McKenna, Jack Warner, Paul Scofield. The Constant Husband (1955), director Sidney Gilliat, producer Sidney Gilliat, Frank Launder. Cast: Kay Kendall, Rex Harrison, Margaret Leighton. Dance Hall (1950), director Charles Crichton, producer Michael Balcon. Cast: Diana Dors, Jane Hylton, Natasha Parry. Daughter of Darkness (1948), director Lance Comfort, producer Victor Hanbury. Cast: Siobhan McKenna, Maxwell Reed, Anne Crawford. Daybreak (1946), director Compton Bennett, producer Sydney Box. Cast: Ann Todd, Eric Portman, Maxwell Reed. *Co-screenwriter Muriel Box. Dear Murderer (1947), director Arthur Crabtree, *producer Betty E. Box. Cast: Greta Gynt, Eric Portman, Maxwell Reed. *Co-screenwriter Muriel Box, *Costumes Yvonne Caffin.

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Devil Girl from Mars (1954), director David MacDonald, producer Edward J. Danziger, Harry Lee Danziger. Cast: Hazel Court, Patricia Laffan, Hugh McDermott. Easy Money (1948), director Bernard Knowles, producer A. Frank Bundy. Cast: (in the ‘football pools’ story) Greta Gynt, Denis Price, Bill Owen. *Coscreenwriter Muriel Box. The Flesh is Weak (1957), director Don Chaffey, producer Raymond Stross. Cast: Milly Vitale, John Derek, Freda Jackson. For Better, For Worse (1954), director J. Lee Thompson, producer Kenneth Harper. Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Susan Stephen, Cecil Parker, Dennis Price. Four Sided Triangle (1953), director Terence Fisher, producer Michael Carreras, Alexander Paal. Cast: Barbara Payton, Stephen Murray, James Hayter, John Van Eyssen. Genevieve (1953), director, producer Henry Cornelius. Cast: Kay Kendall, Kenneth More, John Gregson, Dinah Sheridan. Good Time Girl (1948), director David MacDonald, producer Sydney Box (novel Arthur la Bern). Cast: Jean Kent, Diana Dors, Dennis Price, Herbert Lom. *Co-screenwriter Muriel Box, *Costumes Julie Harris. The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), director Frank Launder, producer Sidney Gilliat, Frank Launder. Cast: Joyce Grenfell, Margaret Rutherford, Alastair Sim. I Believe in You (1952), director, producer Basil Dearden, Michael Relph. Cast: Celia Johnson, Cecil Parker, Joan Collins, Laurence Harvey. It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), director Robert Hamer, producer Michael Balcon (novel Arthur la Bern). Cast: Googie Withers, John McCallum, Susan Shaw, Patricia Plunkett. The L-Shaped Room (1962), director Bryan Forbes, producer Richard Attenborough (*novel Lynne Reid Banks). Cast: Leslie Caron, Cicely Courtneidge, Patricia Phoenix, Tom Bell. Madeleine (1949), director David Lean, producer Stanley Haynes. Cast: Ann Todd, Leslie Banks, Ivan Desney, Elizabeth Sellars. Mandy (1952), director Alexander Mackendrick, producer Michael Balcon (*novel Hilda Lewis). Cast: Phyllis Calvert, Jack Hawkins, Terence Morgan, Mandy Miller. Night and the City (1950), director Jules Drassin, producer Samuel G. Engel (novel Gerald Kersh). Cast: Googie Withers, Richard Widmark, Francis L. Sullivan, Gene Tierney.

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No Times for Tears (1957), director Cyril Frankel, producer W. A. Whittaker. Cast: Anna Neagle, Sylvia Syms, Anthony Quayle, Flora Robson. *Script Anne Burnaby. Odette (1950), director Herbert Wilcox, producer Herbert Wilcox (novel Jerrard Ticknell). Cast: Anna Neagle, Trevor Howard, Marius Goring. Operation Bullshine (1959), director Gilbert Gunn, producer Frank Godwin. Cast Barbara Murray, Carole Lesley, Donald Sinden, Dora Bryan. *Script Anne Burnaby. The Passionate Friends (1949), director David Lean, producer Ronald Neame (novel H. G. Wells). Cast: Ann Todd, Trevor Howard, Claude Rains. Passport to Shame (1959), director Alvin Rakoff, producer John Clein. Cast: Diana Dors, Odile Versois, Herbert Lom, Brenda de Banzie. The Perfect Woman (1949), director Bernard Knowles, producer Alfred Black. Cast: Patricia Roc, Nigel Patrick, Stanley Holloway, Irene Handl. Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945), director Robert Hamer, producer Michael Balcon (play Roland Pertwee). Cast: Googie Withers, Gordon Jackson, Mervyn John. Raising a Riot (1955), *director Wendy Toye, producer Ian Dalrymple, Hugh Perceval (novel Alfred Toombs). Cast: Kenneth More, Shelagh Frazer, Ronald Squire. Room at the Top (1959), director Jack Clayton, producer John Woolf, James Woolf (novel John Braine). Cast: Simone Signoret, Laurence Harvey, Donald Houston, Heather Sears. The Seventh Veil (1945), director Compton Bennett, producer Sydney Box. Cast: Ann Todd, James Mason, Herbert Lom. *Co-screenwriter Muriel Box. Simon and Laura (1955), *director Muriel Box, producer Teddy Baird. Cast: Kay Kendall, Peter Finch, Muriel Pavlow, Ian Carmichael. *Costumes Julie Harris. *Editor Jean Barker, *Art Director Carmen Dillon. So Evil My Love (1948), director Lewis Allen, producer Hal Wallis (novel Joseph Shearing). Cast: Ann Todd, Ray Milland, Geraldine Fitzgerald. Stolen Face (1952), director Terence Fisher, producer Anthony Hinds. Cast: Lizabeth Scott, Paul Henreid, Andre Morell, Mary Mackenzie. *Costumes Edith Head (for Lizabeth Scott). Street Corner (1953), *director Muriel Box, producer Sydney Box. Cast: Anne Crawford, Peggy Cummins, Rosamund John, Eleanor Summerfield. *Coscreenwriter Muriel Box.

214

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Take My Life (1947), director Ronald Neame, producer Anthony HavelockAllen, Cast: Greta Gynt, Hugh Williams, Marius Goring. To Dorothy a Son (1954), *director Muriel Box, producer Ben Schrift, Sydney Box. Cast: Shelley Winters, Peggy Cummins, John Gregson. A Town Like Alice (1956), director Jack Lee, producer Joseph Janni (novel Nevile Shute). Cast: Virginia McKenna, Peter Finch, Maria Lohr, Renee Houston. Turn the Key Softly (1953), director Jack Lee, producer Maurice Cowan (novel John Brophy). Cast: Yvonne Mitchell, Joan Collins, Kathleen Harrison. Value for Money (1955), director Ken Annakin, producer Sergei Nolbandov. Cast: Diana Dors, Susan Stephen, John Gregson. *Costumes Julie Harris. The Weak and the Wicked (1954), director J. Lee Thompson, producer Victor Skutezky (*novel Joan Henry). Cast: Glynis Johns, Diana Dors, Jane Hylton, John Gregson. *Co-screenwriter Anne Burnaby, Joan Henry. Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), director J. Lee Thompson, producer Frank Godwin. Cast Yvonne Mitchell, Sylvia Syms, Anthony Quayle. The World Ten Times Over (1963), director Wolf Rilla, producer Michael Luke. Cast: Sylvia Syms, June Ritchie, William Hartnell. Yield to the Night (1956), director J. Lee Thompson, producer Kenneth Harper (*novel Joan Henry). Cast: Diana Dors, Yvonne Mitchell, Michael Craig, Athene Seyler. *Co-screenwriter Joan Henry. Young Wives’ Tale (1951), director Henry Cass, producer Victor Skutezky (play Ronald Jeans). Cast: Joan Greenwood, Helen Cherry, Nigel Patrick, Derek Farr. *Script Anne Burnaby.

index

215

Index accidents, comic 73, 93 Adam’s Rib 74, 82 adult–child relationship 71–2 Aldrich, Robert 119 alien women 19 see also foreignness All About Eve (Mankiewicz) 153, 156, 163, 164, 170 Allen, Walter 156, 157 An Alligator Named Daisy 73, 75 Allyson, June 155 Ambler, Eric 162, 170 Anderson, Jean 106 Anderson, Lindsay 2, 149, 150 Arnold, Malcolm 32 Aspinall, Sue 42, 46, 58, 65 Associated British Picture Corporation  87, 114 atomic threat 16, 17 audiences costume 32, 138 identification 105, 120–1 statistics 10–11 women 98, 138, 166 The Awful Truth 73–4 Babington, Bruce 44, 48, 76, 80, 93 Bacall, Lauren 160 Banzie, Brenda de 132 Barr, Charles 2 Barton, Ruth 60 Basinger, Jeanine 97, 108, 153 BBC radio 161, 164–6, 167 Beat Girl 72 Becker, Jacques 131–2 Bedelia (Comfort) 44–5, 46, 63 Beveridge, William 5, 41, 68, 70 Bevin, Ernest 71 Bhaji on the Beach 99 birth-rate 6, 9, 17, 71 The Bishop’s Wife 47

Black, George 21 black-market economy 42, 50 Blade Runner (Scott) 20 Blanche Fury 43 Blithe Spirit 21, 73 body parts revitalized 19, 20 Bogarde, Dick 72, 149 Bogart, Humphrey 31 ‘Bond’ novels 127 Bould, Mark 23 Boulting brothers 72 Bowlby, John 2, 6 Box, Betty 164 Box, Muriel 95–6, 150, 164, 174 To Dorothy a Son 67, 75–6, 81–7, 101 Easy Money 49 feminism 12 Simon and Laura 73, 76, 96 Street Corner 101 The Truth About Women 188n85 Box, Sidney 49, 81, 101 Bride of Frankenstein 37 The Bridge on the River Kwai (Lean) 32 Brief Encounter 153, 154 Brighton Rock 42 Bringing Up Baby 73, 74 British Lion 123 British Medical Association 127 British popular cinema audiences 10–11 comedy 72–6 commercial success 11–12 critiques 2 female group film 99–105 feminism 3, 4 femme fatale 41, 42–4, 46–7, 65–6 marriage comedies 13, 67, 74–6 modernity 139–42 prostitute figure 130–3 sexuality 46–7

216

femininity in the frame

social imaginary 3 British quality cinema 152, 154, 162–3 British Social Biology Council 128 Brittain, Vera 5 The Brothers 46 Brothers-in-Law 72 Bryan, Dora 131 Burnaby, Anne 174 irony 12, 76 Operation Bullshine 96 sexual politics 67, 76 and Skutezky 87 The Weak and the Wicked 114, 116–17, 120 The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Lubitsch) 20 Caffin, Yvonne 52 camerawork 156 Carrick, Edward 165 Carroll, Madeleine 47 Carry On Sergeant 72 Carve Her Name With Pride 100 Casablanca 31, 153 Caspary, Vera 44 Casque d’or (Becker) 131–2 Cass, Henry 67, 75–6, 87–95 see also Young Wives’ Tale castration anxiety 29 Caught 155 Cavell, Stanley 73, 82 censorship 17, 123 Central Office of Information 161, 162 Chaffey, Don 123, 134–9, 191n3 see also The Flesh is Weak Chaplin, Charlie 26, 149 Cherry, Helen 87, 89 Chesser, Eustace 130, 136 chiaroscuro lighting 51 Chibnall, Steve 18, 116 child development 2, 6, 139–40 child welfare 68, 101 child welfare clinics 17 childcare 70, 78 Cineguild 46 cinematography, noir 52 class differences birth-rate 17 fantasy 73 femininity 32

housework 70 mess 142 prostitutes 131 sexuality 23–4, 51–2, 64 clothes: see costume cold war politics 17 The Colditz Story 100 Collins, Joan 113 comedy genre 72–6 accidents 73, 93 cross-dressing 25–6 depictions of women 3, 27, 94 family life 71–6 marriage 13, 67 prostitute figure 131 screwball comedy 67 Comfort, Lance Bedelia 44–5, 46, 63 Daughter of Darkness 43, 46, 47, 59–65 The Common Touch 48 Commonwealth 10 companionate marriage female agency 13–14 female friendship 98 female sexuality 127 gender roles 6, 67, 69–70 Compton Bennett, H. W. 54 Conekin, Becky 10 confession mode 63, 64 Conservative government 13 The Constant Husband 74 Constantine, Eddie 124, 132 control 40, 41 see also power Coronation 10, 13, 127 costume copying 52 Daughter of Darkness 62–3 excesses 25 female audience 138 female gaze 32 feminization 80 glamour 49 perfection 33 signalling difference 143 transformation narrative 32–3, 113–14 costume designers 32, 52, 165, 173 costume drama 41, 42, 155 Cover Girl Killer 147 Crabtree, Arthur 51 see also Dear Murderer

index

Craigie, Jill 164 Crawford, Anne 60, 101 Crawford, Joan 18 creative work 79, 124, 188n85 crime films 4, 43, 147 criminality 28–9, 41, 43, 45 crisis scenarios 100–1 The Critics 150, 156, 157, 170, 197n28 cross-dressing 25–6 see also transvestism Crowther Report 6–7 Cukor, George 18 Cummins, Peggy 82, 85, 101–2 Curtis Committee 68 Daily Express 43 Daily Mail 149, 167 Daily Sketch 149 Daily Worker 149 The Dam Busters 17–18, 72, 100 Dance Hall 41 Daughter of Darkness (Comfort) 43, 46, 47, 59–65 Davis, Bette 31, 153, 160, 163 Daybreak (Compton Bennett) 43, 46, 47, 54–6, 55 De la Roche, Catherine 149, 174 ‘Anna Magnani’ 165, 166 autobiography 159 BBC radio 164–6 gender relations 12, 95, 150 ‘H. G. Wells and the Cinema’ 162 ‘The Mask of Realism’ 159–60 ‘Modern Heroine’ 165 National Council of Women 166 Penguin Film Review 149, 152, 158, 159–60, 161 Reed 162–3, 164 ‘That “Feminine Angle”’ 159– 60 Woman 161 ‘Women and Cinema’ 165 Women’s Guild lectures 166 Dead of Night 153 Dear Murderer (Crabtree) 43, 45, 46, 47–8, 51–4 defamiliarization 77, 84–5 dehumanization 26 Derek, John 124, 132

217

desire destructiveness 34 and duty 41 female 126, 136–7 lesbian 117–19, 120 male 3, 28, 31, 34, 38, 39 man-made women 20–1 repression  56 destructiveness 34 Devil Girl from Mars 18 Devis, Pamela 21, 25 Dillon, Carmen 165 divorce  6, 83 Doane, Mary Ann 53, 57, 62, 65 Doctor in the House 77 documentary realism 152 Do-It-Yourself manuals 71 Dolan, Josie 111 The Doll (Lubitsch) 20 domestic servants 70 domesticity 2 age differences 63, 64 and creative work 79 and exotic 63 femininity 157 gender differences 92–3 Langhamer 185n4 sexuality 44–5 skills 115 Young Wives’ Tale 67 doppelgängers 19 Dors, Diana 4, 114–15, 132, 143, 146 double entendres 22–3 Double Indemnity 153 double standards 8, 135 doubling 37, 143 Douglas, Mary 126, 133, 136, 137 Dragonwyck 39 drudgery 91 Dunning, Emily 155 duplicity 52–3 Durgnat, Raymond 73, 138 duty/desire 41 Dyer, Richard 49–50 Ealing productions 17, 46, 72, 159 Easy Money (Knowles) 46, 47, 49–50, 173 Economic Survey (1947) 7, 41 education 6–7, 9 Emergency Ward 10 169

218

femininity in the frame

employment for women: see working women ensemble playing 99 equal but different concept 5, 67, 69, 101, 169 Eros productions 123 eroticism 18, 20 eugenics 17 Evans, Peter William 76, 80, 93 exoticism 31, 48 exploitation, sexual 130, 131, 135 extra-marital sex 8, 126, 136 eye, power of 29 see also gaze facial disfigurement 28–9 The Fallen Idol (Reed) 131 fallen woman iconography 141, 143 family comedy genre 71–6 post-war 5, 102–3 reconstruction of 68 traditional model 5 see also marriage family allowance 5, 17, 70 Family Planning Association 8, 126 Fanny by Gaslight 123 fantasy class differences 73 eroticised 20 male 15, 23, 24, 28, 51 and reality 15, 29 romantic comedy 21 Farr, Derek 87 fatalism 55 father-figure 77, 78–9 female agency 2, 66, 109–12, 120 female body 146 female bonding 108, 116 see also female friendship; homosociality female friendship 98, 115–16, 117–18, 119 female group films 99–105 destructive 100 dynamics 100–1, 106–9 incarceration 112–20 police officers 101–4 solidarity 97–8 A Town Like Alice 98, 100–1, 105–12



The Weak and the Wicked 98, 114–20 Westward the Women 97–8 female sexuality 8–10, 126–8 anxiety about 123 companionate marriage 127 The Flesh is Weak 146 normative/divergent 133 other 132 Passport to Shame 146–7 transgression 66 The Feminine Touch 156 femininity cinematic 3, 4 class differences 32 domestic 157 emotional 94 glamour 52 idealized 29, 38, 39 as masquerade 58–9 motherhood 6, 67 normative/divergent 27, 90, 94, 143 performance of 26, 94 physical appearance 104, 110–11, 167, 190n27 plurality 104–5, 113, 114–15 post-war reconstruction 5, 173 respect for 80, 86–7 robotic 26 as spectrum 85–6, 87–8 transgressive 45, 153 unruly 27 feminist approach 1, 6, 12, 99, 153 feminization 80, 85 femme fatale British popular cinema 4, 12, 13, 41, 42–4, 46–7, 65–6 Doane on 57, 62 frigidity 46 Gynt as 47–50, 65 Lockwood as 43–4 as male fantasy 51 narcissism 51 repressed 54–9 Stott on 63–4 studies of 47 Festival of Britain 16, 127 film noir American 18, 39, 43 cinematography 52 sexuality 63 Spicer on 42

index

women’s roles 48, 63 see also gothic noir film production, male-dominated 160–1, 169 film reviews 12, 149–53, 170–1 De la Roche 158–66 Lockhart 153–8 Robertson 167–70 Films and Filming 77, 149 Finch, Peter 96, 105–6 Fisher, Terence Four-Sided Triangle 15, 18–19, 33–8 Stolen Face 15, 18–19, 28–33, 36 Fleming, Ian 127 The Flesh is Weak (Chaffey) 173 critical response 125–6 female sexuality 146 foreign other 124–5, 132–3 mess/modernity 140–2 non-marital sex 137–8 prostitute as heroine 123, 131, 134–9 sexual politics 138–9 flighty woman stereotype 92 For Better, For Worse 73 Forbes, Bryan 20 Ford, John 150 foreignness 124–5, 132–3, 135 Four-Sided Triangle (Fisher) desire/destruction 34 homoeroticism 37–8 low budget 18 replicating machine 15, 34 same-sex relations 36–7 France 131 Frankenstein 36 Frankenstein story 20 Freud, Sigmund 29, 73 Friedan, Betty 1 frigidity 46, 54, 63 Gainsborough productions 42, 46, 49, 52, 124, 155, 173 gatekeeping function 102–3 gaze appropriated 118–19 female 31, 32 male 23, 29, 118–19 gender politics 1, 76, 95, 119, 162 gender relations 3, 4



219

conservatism 1, 5, 174 De la Roche on 12, 159 female desire 137 feminist relations 66, 109–12, 120 male anxiety 13, 39–40, 121 male paranoia 43 normative 81 public/private spheres 169 in quality film 152 representation 124–5 gender roles companionate marriage 6, 67, 69–70 crisis in 98 differences 15, 92–3 expanding 151–2 inverted 67, 77, 79–80, 83–4 post-war 33 public sphere 131, 155 traditional 1, 2, 13, 68, 87, 89–91 in transition 9, 10, 121 Genevieve 74–5, 76, 77, 94, 95 The Gentle Sex 98, 99 Geoffrey, Wallace 21 Geraghty, Christine 3, 18, 74–5, 86, 94, 109 German Expressionists 20 Gibbens, John 69 Gilbert, Harriett 9 Gilda 49 Giles, Judy 91 Gilliat, Sidney 72, 164–5 The Girl in White 155 glamour 49, 52 Glancy, Mark 163 Gledhill, Christine 48, 63, 64 The Golem 20 Good Housekeeping 149, 151, 159, 167 Good Time Girl 46, 101, 112, 130, 135, 156 Goter, Geoffrey 135 gothic noir 39, 43, 45, 48, 59–65 Grant, Elspeth 149 Great Day 98 Green Years 167 Greenwood, Joan 87, 89, 95 Gregson, John 82, 85, 115 Guardian 43–4 Gynt, Greta Dear Murderer 46, 47, 51–4

220



femininity in the frame

Easy Money 46, 47, 49–50 as femme fatale 47–50, 65 outsider status 65

Haffenden, Elizabeth 44, 52, 165 Hall, Lesley A. 10, 67, 127 Hammer Studios 18, 19, 139, 146, 184n72 Hammer-Lippert co-production 18 The Happiest Days of Your Life 72, 100 Harper, Sue 11, 35–6, 42, 54, 76, 86, 139, 175n5 Harris, Julie 165 Harrison, Kathleen 113 Hayter, James 33–4 Haywood, Ian 9, 72 Hayworth, Rita 49 Head, Edith 32 Henreid, Paul 28, 31–2 Henry, Joan 114, 120 Hepburn, Audrey 88 Hepburn, Katherine 153 Heron, Joyce 118 heterosexuality marriage 13–14, 68, 71 as norm 5 privileged 110, 126 A Town Like Alice 119 Hibbin, Nina 149 Highly Dangerous 155 Hill, John 67 Hinxman, Margaret 149 History of Modern Britain (Marr) 1 Hitchcock, Alfred 30 Hoffman, E. T. A. 20 Holiday Camp 72 Holloway, Stanley 21 Hollywood female gothic 39 film noir 18, 39, 43 post-war housewife 77 prostitute figure 132 romantic comedy 74 star system 97, 99 Home Front films 100, 109 hommes fatales 43 homoeroticism 37–8 homosexuality 128 see also lesbian desire homosociality 37, 100 horror films 18, 19

Horton, Andrew 49 household appliances 70 housewife role Beveridge Report 68 female agency 2 Marr on 1 National Insurance Act 41 normative 66 and paid work 69–70 post-war Hollywood 77 social-realism 67 housework 70, 76, 78, 91, 92–3, 188n84 housing shortages 71, 87 Houston, Penelope 149 ‘how-to’ manuals 69 Hugget series 72, 164 I Believe in You 72, 101, 131 illusion/disillusion 140, 141–2 image production 52–3, 59 imaginary cultural 15, 28 male 19 sexual 18 social 3, 173 In Which We Serve 152 incarceration films 4, 101, 112–20 Independent Producers Ltd 19 intertextuality 49 invasion narratives 17–18 Irish neutrality 60 It Always Rains on Sunday 41, 66 Italy 132 Jacqueline 72 Jeans, Ronald 87 John, Rosamund 101 Johns, Glynis 4, 114–15 Johnson, Lesley 77 Jones, Robert 16 Jordan, Robert Furneaux 156, 157 Jordonova, Ludmilla 36 Kendall, Kay 3, 4, 74–5, 96, 153 Kent, Jean 46 Keown, Eric 156, 157 The Killing of Sister George (Aldrich) 119 Kind Hearts and Coronets 89

index

Kinematograph Weekly 12, 27, 33, 78, 125, 138, 143, 156 Kinsey Reports 8, 118, 126, 136 Klein, Viola 7 Knowles, Bernard Easy Money 46, 47, 49–50, 173 The Perfect Woman 15, 18, 19, 21–8, 36, 173, 174 Kuhn, Annette 25, 67 labour division 69, 81, 91 Labour Party 13, 71 labour-saving devices 70 The Lady 149 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence) 127 The Ladykillers 72 Lambert, Gavin 44 landscape contrasts 60, 61 Landy, Marcia 36–7, 45, 77, 116 Lang, Fritz 20, 36 see also Metropolis Langhamer, Claire 67, 71, 136, 185n4 LaPlace, Maria 98 Launder, Frank 72 Laura (Caspary/Preminger) 44 The Lavender Hill Mob 72 Lawrence, D. H. 127 The Leader 47 Leahy, Sarah 131 Lean, David The Bridge on the River Kwai 32 The Passionate Friends 54, 153, 162 and Todd 54 Lee, Jack A Town Like Alice 97, 98, 100–1, 105–12, 119, 173, 174 Turn the Key Softly 101, 113, 131, 135 Leites, Nathan 42, 65 Lejeune, C. A. 149, 151, 163 lesbian desire 117–19, 120 Letter from an Unknown Woman 156 life-span model 7 Light, Alison 3, 5, 9, 15 Lipscombe, Bill 105 ‘Little Kinsey’ Sex Survey 126, 128 Lloyd, Justine 77 Lockhart, Freda Bruce

221



The Critics 156–7, 170 domesticity 157–8 on Lockwood 44 Picturegoer 149, 153 Woman 149, 151, 153–6 on Woman in a Dressing Gown 151–2, 157–8, 170 Woman’s Hour 151, 156 Lockwood, Margaret Babington on 44–5 Bedelia 44, 46, 63 critics on 43–4 Highly Dangerous 155 Murphy on 46 Lom, Herbert 132, 143 Look Back in Anger 157 Loy, Myrna 160–1 The L-Shaped Room 147 Lubitsch, Ernst 20 Lucky Jim 72 Macaulay, Mary 8, 69 McKenna, Siobhan 46, 47, 59 McKenna, Virginia 3, 4, 97, 100–1, 105–7 Mackenzie, Mary 28 Madeleine 43, 45, 46, 47, 54, 56–9, 173 Madonna of the Seven Moons 41, 66, 155 Madonna/whore dichotomy 2, 86 male anxiety 13, 39–40 male domination 15, 42–3 see also masculinity male groups 100 see also homosociality Malleson, Miles 21 Maltby, Richard 11, 104, 150 The Man in Grey 155 The Man in the White Suit 17 Mandy 67, 72 Mankiewicz, Joseph 163, 164 see also All About Eve man-made women 13, 15, 20–1, 41 Mann, Anthony 18 Manvell, Roger 152 Marr, Andrew 1 marriage 9, 123 comedy genre 13, 67, 74–6 heterosexuality 13–14, 68, 71 ‘how-to’ manuals 69

222

femininity in the frame

opposing concepts of 90–1 welfare state 5–6 see also companionate marriage Martin, Angela 53 Marwick, Arthur 16 masculinity anxieties 13, 39–40 appropriation of 89–90, 111–12 housework 92 normative 77–8 Mason, James 155 Mass Observation ‘Little Kinsey’ Sex Survey 126, 128 marriage/family 68 surveys 10–11, 12 ‘Where is Science Taking Us?’  16 masturbation 8 maternity benefit 5 Maxfield, James 56 Mayne, Judith 115–16, 118 mechanization 26 The Men in Grey 43 mess 139–42, 145–6 Messina gang 133 Metropolis (Lang) 20, 26, 36 Mildred Pierce 153, 154, 168 Millions Like Us 98 Ministry of Fear 153 Minnelli, Vincente 165 Miranda 21, 73 mise-en-scène 178n55 coffee bars 193n37 ‘fallen woman’ 143 sexuality 13 ‘shop-soiled’ 145 misogynist attitudes 28, 86 Mitchell, Basil 21 Mitchell, Yvonne 4, 113, 153, 156–7 Modern Times (Chaplin) 26 modernity 18, 139–42, 145–6 Mona Lisa Smile 1–2 monstrosity 18, 31 Monthly Film Bulletin 78, 95, 114, 125, 163 morbid films 43 More, Kenneth 77–8 Morey, Anne 115 Morris, Meaghan 195n4 Moseley, Rachel 32–3, 60, 176n28

Mosley, Leonard 43 motherhood 2, 5, 6, 67, 167–8, 199n69 The Mouse that Roared 18 Murphy, Robert 2, 4, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48 Murray, Stephen 33 My Reputation 154 Myrdal, Alva 7 narcissism 51 narrator, male 57 National Council of Women 166 National Health Service 70, 101 National Insurance Act 5, 41 National Marriage Guidance Council 69, 126 Neagle, Anna 111, 160 New Look 25 new social order 2, 9–10 New Woman 3, 86 New Zealand Film Commission 159 Newsom, John 6 Newton, Robert 163 Nicholson, Nora 106 Night and the City 46 No Times for Tears 101 noir film: see film noir; gothic noir noisy voices 1, 4, 171 see also unruly woman non-marital sex 135–6, 137–8 Norway 48 Now Voyager 31, 154, 155 nuclear fears 16, 17 Obscene Publications Act 127 Observer 149, 163 Obsession 43 obsessive love 53 The October Man 43 Odd Man Out 162–3 Odette 100 older woman 63, 64, 108, 111 Oliver Twist 123 One Night of Love 116, 117 Operation Bullshine 72, 96, 100 oppositional texts 11–12, 174 Oram, Alison 118 orgasm 8, 126 Orwell, George 16, 26

index

otherness 31, 48, 132 outsider-figure 61, 64, 65, 117, 132, 147 paranoia, male 43 parenting 71 The Passionate Friends (Lean) 54, 153, 162 Passport to Shame (Rakoff) critical response 125–6 female sexuality 146–7 foreignness 124, 132–3 mess 145–6 modernity 145–6 prostitute as heroine 123, 131, 142–6 patriarchy 97, 98, 115, 120 Patrick, Nigel 21, 87, 95 Payton, Barbara 33, 38 Penguin Books 127 Penguin Film Review 170 De la Roche 149, 152, 158, 159–60, 161 Robertson 149, 167, 168 Perfect Strangers 154 The Perfect Woman (Knowles) 15, 18, 19, 21–8, 36, 173, 174 performance 26, 27, 48, 94 Perkins, T. E. 92 Perkins, Tessa 1 Petticoat Pirates 100 Phelan, Lyn 20, 31, 37 Philips, Deborah 9 Phoenix, Pat 147 physical appearance 104, 110–11, 167, 190n27 Picture Post 71, 149, 161, 163, 170 Picture Show 95 Picturegoer 12, 27, 38, 77, 149, 153 Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting 166 Pink String and Sealing Wax 45, 46 Place, Janey 51 plastic surgery 28–9 plastics 70–1, 180n40 pleasure sexuality 8, 69, 126 spectatorship 25, 26 poisoning 45, 46, 182n19 pollution 126, 133, 136, 143 Porter, Vincent 11, 12, 76, 139,

223

195–6n10 Portman, Eric 51, 53, 54–5 Powell, Dilys 149, 151, 163 power 46, 58 pregnancy before marriage 136 pre-marital sex 8, 127, 135–6 Preminger, Otto 44 prisoner-of-war films 100 Private’s Progress 72 professions for women 155–6 Profumo affair 13 prostitute figure 4, 12 British popular cinema 66, 130–9 class differences 131 comic 131 Hollywood 132 Italy 132 and ordinary women 123, 133, 134, 145 as outsider 147 pollution 133 psychological factors 134, 135, 142, 143 visibility 129–30 Wolfenden Report 14, 123, 128, 131, 133, 134, 147 prostitution class differences 131 criminalization 128 foreignness 132–3, 135 organized 133 pollution 126, 133 Wolfenden 128–9, 137 psychoanalytic model 29 psychology of child development 2, 6 public institutions 101 public role of women 131, 155 public/private spheres 102, 104, 144–5, 169, 188 pulp fiction 18 purity 136, 137 Pygmalion trope 28–9 The Quatermass Experiment 17 Quigly, Isabel 149 racial conflict 132–3 Radway, Janice 138 Raising a Riot (Toye) 67, 174

224

femininity in the frame

gender roles 96 labour division 81 role reversal 75, 76–81, 92 Rakoff, Alvin 123, 124, 142–6 see also Passage to Shame Rank productions 47 rationing 25, 42 The Rattle of a Simple Man 147 realism 98, 100, 152 reality 15, 29 Rebecca 39 reconstructive surgery 28 Redgrave, Michael 17–18 Reed, Carol De la Roche on 162–3, 164, 170 The Fallen Idol 131 Odd Man Out 162–3 Reed, Maxwell 55 replicating machine 15, 34 repression 56 reproductive science 15, 17, 19–20 Richards, Jeffrey 156 Robertson, E. Arnot 174 BBC radio 167 Daily Mail 149, 167 feminist view 95 Good Housekeeping 149, 167 Penguin Film Review 149, 167, 168 private sphere 158 sexual difference 170 ‘Woman and the Film’ 167 ‘A Woman’s Film’ 167, 169–70 Woman’s Hour 167, 168–9 Roc, Patricia 21, 24, 27, 46 Rogers, Peter 86 role reversal 67, 75–6, 84–5 see also gender roles romantic comedy 21, 74 romantic fiction 68–9 Room at the Top 147 Rowe, Kathleen 27 Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce 5–6, 68 Royal Commission on Population 68 St Trinian’s series 40, 72, 100 same-sex relations 8, 36–7 see also homoeroticism; lesbianism

Sandbrook, Dominic 127 satirical comedy 72 Schatz, Thomas 74, 82, 94 science and technology 16 science fiction 4, 13, 18 science fiction cinema 17–19, 35–6 scientist as comic figure 18, 21 scopophilia 29 Scott, Lizabeth 28, 32 Scott, Rebecca 46 Scott, Ridley 20 screwball comedy 67, 73 Secret Beyond the Door 45 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 37 Sequence 149 service comedies 72, 100 set design 165 Seven Days to Noon 17 The Seventh Veil 54 sex education 123 sex toy imagery 23, 24 sexual difference 169, 170 sexual discourse 63, 64 Sexual Offences Act 129 sexual politics 100, 138–9, 159 sexuality British cinema 46–7 class differences 23–4, 51–2, 64 criminality 41 criminalized 118 disruptive 127 domesticity 44–5 film noir 63 mainstream culture 123 and mise-en-scène 13 pleasure 69, 126 power 46, 58 transgression 63, 64–5 see also female sexuality Seyler, Athene 114 The Shakedown 147 She’ll Be Wearing Pink Pyjamas 99 Shelley, Mary 20 Shingler, Martin 163 shop soiled trope 135, 145 shopping motif 32–3 Shute, Nevil 105 Sight and Sound 43, 48, 149 Signoret, Simone 132 Simon and Laura (Box) 73, 76, 96 Sinclair, Dorothy 62 Skutezky, Victor 87, 114 Sloane, Olive 114

index

The Small Back Room 43 Smart, Carol 128 So Bright the Flame 153, 155 So Evil My Love 43, 45, 46 social mobility 30, 113 social realism 67, 156 social-problem genre 99, 101, 105, 112–13, 124 soliciting 129 Some Like It Hot 25, 74 The Sound Barrier 54 The Spanish Gardener 72 special mission films 100 The Spectator 149 spectatorship 18, 25, 26 see also audiences; gaze Spicer, Andrew 42, 43, 48, 72, 75 spider woman iconography 51 The Spiral Staircase 45 Spiv cycle 42–3, 130 Stacey, Jackie 104 Stanwyck, Barbara 44, 153 star system 97, 99 state interventions 101 The Stepford Wives (Forbes) 1, 20 stereotyping 59, 92 Stolen Face (Fisher) 15, 18, 28–33, 36 Stott, Rebecca 63–4 Strange Impersonation 18 Street, Sarah 111 Street Corner (Box) 101 Street Offences Act 129 Stross, Raymond 123, 124 Summerfield, Eleanor 102 Summerfield, Penny 69 The Sunday Times 149 Syms, Sylvia 4, 9 Take My Life 48 Tasker, Yvonne 97, 117 Taylor, John Russell 168–9 teenagers 72 They Made Me a Fugitive 42, 43 They Were Sisters 154 Thompson, J. Lee and Burnaby 87, 120 The Weak and the Wicked 87, 98, 101, 114–20, 130 Woman in a Dressing Gown 67, 151–2, 153, 156–8, 170, 197n30

225

Tiger Bay 72 Time and Tide 44 To Dorothy a Son (Box) 67, 101 divorce 83 role reversal 75–6, 81–7 transvestism 85 wife/sex object 85–6, 95–6 Today’s Cinema 33 Todd, Ann Daybreak 46, 47, 54–6 as femme fatale 47, 54–9, 65 frigidity 54, 63 Madeleine 46, 47, 56–9 So Evil My Love 46 A Town Like Alice (Lee) 173 commercial success 174 female agency, curtailed 109–12 female group 98, 100–1, 105–9 gender-neutral publicity 105 group dynamics 106–9 heterosexuality 119 McKenna 97 Toye, Wendy 150 gender relations 12 Raising a Riot 1, 67, 75–81, 92, 96, 174 trade magazines 12 transformation narrative 32–3, 113–14 transgression femininity 45, 153 performance 27 sexual 63, 64–5, 66 transvestism 74, 80, 85 Tribune 16 Trotter, David 126, 139, 142, 146 The Truth About Women (Box) 188n85 Turn the Key Softly (Lee) 101, 113, 131, 135 Turner, Lana 160 Twice Round the Daffodils 75 Two Cities 19 The Two Mrs Carrolls 39 2,000 Women 98, 190n25 unruly woman 27, 100 Value for Money 73 vamp 47 Van Eyssen, John 33

226

femininity in the frame

venereal disease 126 Versois, Odile 124, 132, 143 Vertigo (Hitchcock) 30 Vesselo, Arthur 43, 48, 181n8 Vidor, King 165 villainy, female 42, 47–8 see also criminality Vitale, Milly 124, 132 War and Peace (Vidor) 165 war films 3, 39, 100, 153–4 Warner, Jack 72 Waterloo Road 42 The Weak and the Wicked (Thompson) exploitation 130 friendships 98, 101 gender politics 87, 119, 120 prison scenes 114–20 welfare state 5–6, 13, 17, 68, 101 Wellman, William 97–8 Wells, H. G. 162 Westward the Women (Wellman) 97–8 The Wicked Lady 43, 123, 155 Wilson, Elizabeth gender roles 2 housework 70 labour division 69 marriage 68 noisy voices 1, 4, 171 sexual pleasure 8 Winnicott, D. W. 6, 17, 139–40 Winnington, Richard 152, 163 Winship, Janet 68, 70, 153 Winters, Shelley 82 Withers, Googie 46 wives 5, 67, 85–6, 95–6 see also marriage Wolfenden Report 12, 129–30, 193n30 prostitutes 14, 123, 128, 131, 133, 134, 147 prostitution control 128–9, 137 psychological factors 134, 142, 143 Wolfenstein, Martha 42, 65 Wollen, Peter 42 Woman 44, 68, 149, 151, 153, 155–6, 161 Woman in a Dressing Gown (Thompson) 153, 197n30

critiques of 156–8 housewife/mother 67 Lockhart on 151–2, 157–8, 170 A Woman’s Face 18 Woman’s Hour 150, 170 De la Roche 152, 153, 159, 164–6 Lockhart 151, 156 Robertson 153, 167, 168–9 Women of the Streets (British Social Biology Council) 128 women police officers 101–2, 101–4 women-in-prison films: see incarceration women’s films 98, 154, 183–4n56 Women’s Guild lectures 166 women’s magazines 151–2 working women ambiguities 23 dual duties 69–70 education 7 post-war 2, 9 welfare state 101 WWII 1 The World Ten Times Over 147 Wright, Helena 8 Wyer, Reginald 52 X-rating 125 The Yellow Balloon 72 Yield to the Night 101, 112–13, 130, 156 Young, Loretta 47 Young Wives’ Tale (Cass) 114 accidents 93 domesticity 67 femininity 90, 94 gender roles 87, 89–91 housework 75–6, 92–3 labour division 91 marriage 88–9 nanny 88–9 success 95, 174