Rescued by Rover (1905)
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Millions Like Us (1943)[Production Company: Gainsborough Pictures. Directors and screenwriters: Frank Launder & Sidney Gilliat. Cinematographer: Jack Cox, Roy Fogwell. Editor: R.E. Dearing. Music: Louis Levy. Cast: Eric Portman (Charlie Forbes), Patricia Roc (Celia Crowson), Gordon Jackson (Fred Blake), Anne Crawford (Jennifer Knowles), Joy Your husband is dead. You’re far from home, with a monotonous job you never wanted. All your romantic dreams have been shattered. And there’s a war on. Still, never mind, join in with a good old sing-along and everything will be better… So ends Millions Like Us, a testament to the courage, cheerfulness and resolution of the British people on the home front during World War Two. It is also British cinema’s most sublime piece of propaganda. The part played by ordinary men and women during the Second World War led to the idea of it being a ‘people’s war’. With encouragement from the government via the Ministry of Information (MOI), British wartime films presented an ideology of national unity and social cohesion. Everyone had a part to play in the war effort, no matter what class or gender. What emerges is a democratic sense of community and comradeship, where the country’s interests are greater than that of the individual. The government needed all these powers of persuasion when it came to the difficult issue of the conscription of women. Voluntary appeals had failed to find enough recruits and female conscription was introduced with the National Service (No 2) Act of December 1941. All single women between nineteen and thirty had the option of either the non-combatant Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) or working full-time in essential industries. Two months later, the Employment of Women Order of February 1942 allowed the government to direct the movement of female workers aged eighteen to forty. Consternation and resentment about such powers had to be assuaged. Women had to be reassured that mobilisation was vital to the war effort and that they were capable of performing their assigned tasks well. Men, concerned about their future livelihood, just had to be reassured that this was a temporary state of affairs brought about by the war. Anxieties such as these are articulated in Millions Like Us. Originally planned as a documentary about the home front, Millions Like Us changed form when the MOI approached Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat to write a script. Launder and Gilliat were established in the British film industry having scripted such successes as Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Night Train to Munich (Carol Reed, 1940). Both films feature the comic double-act of upper-class officers, Charters and Caldicott (played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, respectively, who also appear in Millions Like Us). However, Launder empathised with the MOI, and wanting to create a socially responsible, realist cinema showing ‘people we know – people that live next door to us – that travel with us on the bus.’ (in Brown 1977: 9) In preparation for their script, Launder and Gilliat toured the country, visiting various places of work all over Britain, including munitions factories. They came to the conclusion, with commercial interests in mind, that the best way to provide what the Ministry wanted was ‘to cloak it in a simple fictional story.’ (Brown 1977: 108) According to Gilliat they were ‘greatly impressed with the fate … of the conscripted woman, the mobile woman. And that’s what we would have liked to call the thing if it hadn’t been such a silly title!’ (in Brown 1977: 108) Silly title or not, ‘The Mobile Woman’ would have been far less appropriate for a film that directly addresses its intended mass audience: ‘and millions like you’ run the credits after listing the stars and just before the title, Millions Like Us. It is also one of the first British films to place working-class women at the heart of its narrative as serious fictional characters without recourse to comedy or cliché. Furthermore, the original documentary approach is still present in the film, providing a context within which the propaganda is embedded. Millions Like Us opens with the masses: documentary footage of working people purposefully marching to and from work underlined by the strident tones of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. These are the ‘millions like you’ addressed in the credits. It is interesting that the address is initially aimed at the working-classes. As the film progresses, other classes are encompassed, principally through the cameos of Charters and Caldicott and also by the character of Jennifer Knowles (Anne Crawford), the upper-class socialite; all have difficulty adapting to wartime changes. Furthermore, the casting of Patricia Roc, with her RP tones, turns the character of Celia into a classless ‘everywoman’. There then follows a montage sequence of the masses at the seaside accompanied by an ironic-nostalgic voice-over: ‘Remember that summer before the war?’ It appeals to the collective memory of those days before the war and rationing, before powdered eggs, when you could still slip up on a piece of orange peel. The non-diegetic onscreen reminder as to what an orange is provides a nod and a wink to a knowing audience. It’s a cheap, throwaway gag but humour helps to sugar-coat the pill of propaganda. However, there’s now a war on, priorities are different and things have changed, as the film later makes clear: Charters and Caldicott have mined the beaches and the Eastgate that Celia revisits on her honeymoon with Fred (Gordon Jackson) is very different from the one she visited on her family holidays. Once this opening montage is over, the film dissolves to a barrel organ (the film does allow space for some working-class clichés) and the camera tracks to the Crowford family preparing for their summer vacation. The story of how the war affects a typical working-class family has begun. However, this does not signal an end to the documentary aspects of the film. For the first half hour, the film adopts a panoramic approach, interweaving the characters (the ‘private’), with the ‘public’ sphere of the history of the war so far, detailed in documentary style. The later validates the former, as Andrew Higson observes: The film seems to declare that the individual dramas only make sense within the real historical space already established in the initially unnarrativised diegesis. This more objective (because documentary) sense of history orders and situates, and therefore validates what would otherwise be the mere discourse of the film’s little dramas. (1995: 240) Therefore, the narrative is rendered authentic and realistic by the documentary techniques. But as the film progresses, those aspects become contained within the narrative. The most notable instance of this is when Celia boards the bus to the factory (to the familiar jaunty strains of the theme from the radio programme, Worker’s Playtime) and between this and her arrival, there is a montage sequence showing the construction of a bomber. Celia will become part of this important chain. However, the realism continues with many scenes beginning or ending by dwelling on an authentic detail: pamphlets, posters or productivity charts. Although the film begins with a panoramic overview of how people are reacting to the war, the narrative eventually focuses on the experiences of Celia, recounting her coming-of-age. Shy, naïve and dreaming of Charles Boyer, Celia does display a practical side by being the surrogate mother-figure of the family. The antithesis is her good-time sister, Phyllis (Joy Shelton), who, despite initial impressions, enlists in the ATS, placing country above her father’s wishes, and makes a success of it. Celia also dreams of joining the ATS upon conscription. In contrast to the objective documentary realism of the film to this point, Celia’s daydream at the labour exchange is depicted: a subjective reverie of the romantic possibilities while working for the ATS. However, reality intrudes at the interview when her options are limited and factory work is assigned. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of in a factory,’ the civil servant tells her, ‘Mr Bevin needs another million women.’ The film’s central propaganda message is thus cleverly incorporated into the narrative. It is reiterated upon arrival at the factory. Greeted by the no-nonsense northern foreman, Charlie Forbes (Eric Portman), the women are welcomed with the words: ’Now you’d better understand there’s not much glamour in a machine shop. You’ll be working with small component parts you’ll never hear of again. But you’ll be indispensable, remember that.’ While Celia has fears, like all the women, about her new life, it is Gwen Price (Megs Jenkins) who articulates them to the negative extreme: they are now part of a “chain-gang” and she imagines the dormitories as ‘a cross between a house of correction and a home for illegitimate children.’ The reality is somewhat different. They are met by a caring matron, the work is hard but there is regular entertainment in the form of communal meals, dances and concerts (strangely, cinema is not included!). The new community presents a cross-section of classes and parts of the country: Celia (working-class, London), Jennifer (upper-class), Gwen (working-class, Wales), and Annie Earnshaw (working-class, the North). Annie (Terry Randall) presents a more ‘common’ version of the working-class in comparison to Celia, and her scenes are mainly played for humour, particularly regarding the culture-clash with Jennifer. What they all share are the circumstances that have brought them together and they cohere into community for the benefit of the country. Yet Celia threatens to disrupt this with her romance and marriage to Fred. Unlike Jennifer, who merely has dalliances, Celia still has romantic dreams and sees a future with a husband and children – or rejection and suicide as revealed in another dream sequence. Despite his own naivety and shyness, Fred takes a more realistic view: he worries about how they will afford to live in the future. Millions Like Us is thus notable because it acknowledges a time when the war will be over. (1) However, despite placing private interests above those of the country, the institution of marriage is not questioned; neither are Jennifer’s dalliances condoned. Her burgeoning romance with Charlie is a counterpoint: how war can cause an unlikely attraction across the classes and regions. Charlie, ever the realist, realises this and makes the point in the penultimate scene. (2) He wonders if this classless society will continue after the war, or whether they will slide back into old ways. ‘That’s what I want to know. I’m not marrying you, Jenny, till I’m sure.’ The film ends with another communal dinner and concert. The band is ironically playing ‘Waiting at the Church’ much to Celia’s discomfort. Then there’s the sound of bombers flying overhead. So, your husband is dead: but he has been sacrificed for the greater good. You’re far from home and family: but you’ve found a new ‘family’ with your community of friends who encourage you to join in and sing. The job may be monotonous but it’s essential. All your romantic dreams have been shattered but now you can face the reality of the home front: after all, you’re indispensable and you can hold your head high. The final dissolve from a medium close-up of Celia up to the bombers flying overhead makes this point explicit, and the ‘millions like us’ can also exit the cinema, heads held high. Notes
Further ReadingGeoff Brown, Launder and Gilliat, London, BFI, 1977. James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939-1945, London & New York, I. B. Taurus, 2000. Christine Gledhill & Gillian Swanson, ‘Gender and Sexuality in Second World War Films – A Feminist Approach’, in Geoff Hurd (ed.) National Fictions: World War Two in British Films and Television, London, British Film Institute, 1984, pp. 56-62. Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995. Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991. Nigel Herwin Brief Encounter (1945) [Production Company: Cineguild. Director: David Lean. Screenwriters: Noel Coward, David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan. Cinematographer: Robert Krasker. Editor: Jack Harris. Music: Sergei Rachmaninov. Cast: Celia Johnson (Laura Jesson), Trevor Howard (Dr. Alec Harvey), Joyce Carey (Myrtle Bagot), Stanley Holloway (Albert Godby), Cyril Raymond (Fred Jesson).] Jeremy Paxman begins his book, The English: A Portrait of a People, with a detailed account of the film Brief Encounter: a good indicator of just how far this film has become an icon not only of British cinema but also of British national identity, particularly in terms of the behaviour of its two lead characters. Laura (Celia Johnson), a housewife, and Alec (Trevor Howard), a doctor, both happily married to other people, happen to fall in love with each other, quite by chance and apparently without calculation, after he removes a piece of grit from her eye. Friendship develops into romance, and the couple meet in town once a week before they finally call off their ‘affair’, which remains unconsummated. Their sense of duty towards their respective spouses and families, as well as their overwhelming need to behave in accordance with the accepted morality of the time, prevents them from taking their relationship any further. Instead, sexual passion is displaced by awkward conversation and furtive, loving glances at each other in the Milford Junction station tearoom or the Kardomah café: no wonder that Raymond Durgnat proclaimed the motto of the film to be ‘Make tea not love.’ (1971: 181) Durgnat further noted how the film that was critically lauded film upon its 1945 release (even winning the Critics' Prize at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival) met with quite a different reception twenty years later, when its ethos of restraint no longer seemed quite so appealing to the exponents of sixties free love, and the most innocuous little details of the film provoked impatience and irritation in its viewers. He recalls that at one screening he attended ‘Even the name of the town enraged a well-spoken young lady who finally cried out, “Where the hell is Milford Junction anyway?”’ (1971: 180) However, the suggestion that the film did not meet with antipathy until the 1960s is slightly misleading, since even in the 1940s the film had a mixed reception. When it was first test-screened in a cinema in Kent that had a working-class clientele, it was heckled and laughed at throughout because of the (much parodied) middle-class speech of its protagonists, not to mention its unimpeachably 'correct' morality. Brief Encounter may be a national icon but from the moment of its initial release onwards there have been any number of iconoclasts who have called into question its ability to speak for them and their national identity. Perhaps the critic Gavin Lambert was correct when he called the film a ‘definitive document of middle-class repression’, the last word on a particular kind of Britishness, specific to a time and a place and most crucially a class. (1) Even within the film, we see the operation of a slightly different moral code via the parallel relationship between Myrtle (Joyce Carey), the station tearoom manageress and Albert (Stanley Holloway), the stationmaster, who belong to a different social class from Alec and Laura, and are less inhibited about acting on their feelings for each other. (2) Brief Encounter was the fourth and final collaboration between the celebrated playwright Noel Coward and director David Lean, who would go on to make two of the most highly regarded adaptations of Dickens novels, Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) before moving into epic mode with later films such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Having risen to the status of the top British film editor by the end of the 1930s, Lean had been asked to co-direct the war film In Which We Serve (1942) with Noel Coward, providing technical expertise to complement Coward's ease with actors. The partnership proved highly successful and continued with Lean directing the family saga This Happy Breed (1944) and the supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit (1945), both adaptations of Coward's stage successes. It is a sign of Lean's growing confidence as a director that he encouraged Coward to rethink the chronological structure of his half-hour play Still Life, the source for Brief Encounter, when converting it into a screenplay. Lean told Coward that the original dramatic structure lacked intrigue and surprise. He suggested that the film version could play with audience expectation by beginning with an enigmatic scene showing the couple's final parting: … and then you go back and explain that this is the last time they see each other. They were never going to see each other again. And you play the first scene in the picture - it made no sense to you at all and you didn't hear half the dialogue - again, and that's the end of the film. (in Brownlow 1997: 194) This strategy is highly effective, particularly as it comes at the film’s most emotionally extreme moment; Laura’s sudden suicidal impulse. In the first version, we remain in the tearoom with Myrtle and Laura’s friend Dolly (Everley Gregg) vaguely wondering where Laura has got to, before she re-enters the room looking pale and shaky. In the second version, we go with Laura as she rushes out onto the platform determined to throw herself under the express train thundering past, and this time we understand the significance of the moment and know exactly why she has reached this abject state. She hesitates at the last moment and resists suicide, although as she admits in her voice-over narration (an imaginary confession to her husband, but also the key to the viewer’s intimacy and empathy with the character) that this is not because of a sense of duty towards her family but because she ‘wasn’t brave enough’ to go through with it. Despite Lean’s important contribution to the film, in 1945 the film was sold as a Noel Coward film, and Andy Medhurst has read the film as an oblique expression of Coward’s homosexuality. The film’s forbidden relationship is heterosexual, but its depiction of ‘the pain and grief caused by having one’s desires destroyed by the pressures of social convention’ (1994: 204) could be understood as a coded reference to the tribulations of (then still illegal) homosexual relationships. Several decades on, Richard Kwietniowski’s short film Flames of Passion (1990) paid homage to Brief Encounter’s queer subtext by offering a gay re-imagining of the original film. It even takes its title from the torrid melodrama that Alec and Laura go to see at the cinema, but which they leave halfway through because they find it too silly and implausible. Brief Encounter’s ‘meta-cinematic’ elements (characters within the film commenting on films and the focus on aspects of 1940s cinema-going like the differently priced seats, the organist who plays beforehand, the trailers and Disney cartoon prior to the main film) are important reminders of the central role that fantasy plays in our lives; every small town has its cinema where people can spend a pleasant few hours inhabiting a cinematic dream world. However, Laura seems particularly prone to the lure of fantasy. She borrows romantic novels from the library and, as her husband Fred (Cyril Raymond) remarks, she is a ‘poetry addict’ able to fill in the missing word from his crossword puzzle, taken from a line from Keats (‘Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance’ – a phrase that could apply to Laura’s own romance, punctuated by clouds of steam and smoke from passing trains). Meanwhile for down-to-earth Fred, ‘romance’ is just ‘something in seven letters’ that fits in with ‘delirium’ and ‘Baluchistan’. Laura is the one who turns on the radio broadcast of Rachmaninov when she returns home from her final terrible meeting with Alec, and who uses the pounding dramatic Russian music as a soundtrack for her remembrance of her love affair, communicating the depth of her feelings where words fail. Indeed, the emotive power of these elements of the film belie its reputation as a realist, restrained, repressed text, and as Richard Dyer suggests, to see Brief Encounter ‘as only cups of tea, banal conversation and guilt is not really to see or hear it at all.’ (1993: 66) Rather, it is precisely that interaction in the film between suburban mundanity – such as going to Boots to buy a toothbrush, eating a Banbury cake at a café – and overwhelming unexpected emotion – falling in love, wanting to die if one cannot be with one’s lover – that makes Brief Encounter so resonant. At one point Laura says ‘I’m an ordinary woman – I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people’; but the film never lets us forget that beneath the surface of bland normality, unsuspected flames of passion flicker away; that in the imagination of a respectable middle-class housewife, the ‘pollarded willows by the canal just before the level crossing’ can be magically transformed into moonlit palm trees under which she embraces her lover. The film grants us privileged access into these suppressed dreams and brings them vividly to life while also recognising the impossibility of sustaining them in reality. ‘Whatever your dream was – it wasn’t a very happy one, was it?’ says a newly-insightful Fred to Laura in the film’s final moments, and on the whole he is right, for her romantic idyll causes her more pain than pleasure. And yet Laura still wants ‘to remember every minute – always – always – to the end of my days.’ One final point, although it may not be immediately apparent to today’s viewer, the cinema-goer of 1945 would have recognised instantly that Brief Encounter was not a contemporary drama but set a few years earlier, pre-war. It carefully depicts a late-1930s milieu with pointed details like Laura and Fred being able to leave their curtains open with lights blazing (no blackout), trains running on time, and no coupons required to buy items like chocolate. But there is more to Brief Encounter’s temporal shift than simple nostalgia for the luxuries of the recent past. As Antonia Lant has argued, a ‘contemporary audience member could view the film with a sense of historical superiority that appealed to his or her sense of place, knowing that the constructed epoch on the screen had a definite and catastrophic endpoint.’ (1991: 170) Neither Alec nor Laura seem to realise that their affair is taking place in the larger historical context of the final days before the beginning of the Second World War, and there is an irony implicit in their renunciation of each other in favour of stability and continuity (‘One has one’s roots after all, hasn’t one?’, Dolly states, a sentiment with which Laura agrees, albeit rather half-heartedly) when the world is about to change immeasurably, and roots are about to be ripped up, no matter what they choose to do. Notes
Further Reading Kevin Brownlow, David Lean, London, Faber, 1997. Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England, London, Faber, 1971. Richard Dyer, Brief Encounter, London, BFI, 1993. Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991. Andy Medhurst, ‘That Special Thrill: Brief Encounter, Homosexuality and Authorship’, Screen, vol.32, no. 2, Summer 1991. Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People, London, Penguin, 1999. Melanie Williams The Wicked Lady (1945) [Production Company: Gainsborough Pictures. Director and screenwriter: Leslie Arliss. Cinematographer: Jack Cox. Editor: Terence Fisher. Music: Hans May. Cast: Margaret Lockwood (Barbara Worth), James Mason (Capt. Jerry Jackson), Patricia Roc (Caroline), Griffith Jones (Sir Ralph Skelton), Michael Rennie (Kit Locksby), Felix Aylmer (Hogarth).] The Wicked Lady is the best known example of a cycle of film-making called Gainsborough melodrama, named after the British studio that found itself specialising in racy costume dramas in the mid-1940s. This film, along with others like The Man in Grey (Arliss 1943), Fanny by Gaslight (Anthony Asquith 1944), Madonna of the Seven Moons (Arthur Crabtree 1944), Caravan (Crabtree 1946) and Jassy (Bernard Knowles 1947), provided a potent form of escapism for audiences in the grim years of wartime and immediate post-war austerity. They were despised by critics for their lack of historical verisimilitude – ‘Perhaps because I am, by inclination at least, an historian, The Wicked Lady arouses in me a nausea out of proportion to the subject’, fumed Simon Harcourt-Smith in Tribune – but British cinemagoers flocked to them nonetheless. (1) Indeed, in research conducted by the British Film Institute to ascertain which films have been most popular at the British box office from the 1930s to the present day, The Wicked Lady, the most successful of the Gainsborough melodramas, ranked ninth in the top 100, with an estimated audience attendance of 18.4 million. (2) Clearly, this was a film that captured the public’s imagination. However much it infuriated the critical establishment, Gainsborough were less concerned with absolute historical accuracy than with using the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century settings of their films as a source of visual pleasure. Indeed, they acted in part as a pretext for showcasing elaborate sets and opulent costumes (such as the low-cut gowns designed by costumier Elizabeth Haffenden for The Wicked Lady), a world away from the utility furniture and rationed clothes of the contemporary situation. As Harcourt-Smith was willing to admit, it was precisely the contrast with ‘the tedium, the grey ruin of modern life’ that made the Gainsborough style of flamboyant costume drama so popular. (1) An additional source of their appeal for female cinema-goers was their focus on heroines, sometimes virtuous but sometimes thrillingly bad, as in the case of Barbara Skelton (Margaret Lockwood) in The Wicked Lady. Very often, there was a doubling between good and bad women in the films, with each rivals for the same man, as in the case of sweet sincere Caroline (Patricia Roc) and sly scheming Barbara who here compete for the affections of both Ralph (Griffith Jones) and Kit (Michael Rennie). (3) Female cinemagoers could thus enjoy a dual identification, supporting the well-behaved girl but also surreptitiously revelling in the antics of the outrageously badly behaved one. Barbara is ruthlessly ambitious and intolerant of any kind of boredom (“I like danger”), which finally leads to her career in highway robbery, as a desperate attempt to inject some excitement into her suffocating existence. Her behaviour is frequently unsympathetic: she tramples over the feelings of her supposed best friend, Caroline (after having stolen Caroline’s fiancée, and hurrying him into marriage, the spurned bride-to-be kindly offers to give Barbara her wedding dress only to be told, ‘Wear that? I wouldn’t be buried in it.’) and once installed as the lady of the house, fails to conceal her impatience with the dull round of needlework and household management that her new role entails. One of the things that particularly annoys her is the genealogical chatter of the two maiden aunts of the family, hinting at Barbara’s unease with discussions of ancestry, since she is from a family of a lower social class than the one she has managed to marry into, and not keen to be reminded of her inauspicious origins. Baulking at rural domesticity, instead she longs for the social whirl of London, to be admired and envied by her peers. Wicked she may be but there is nonetheless something almost admirable about Barbara’s demonic energy. Using language more characteristic of a woman of the twentieth century than one of the restoration, she complains ‘I’ve got looks and brains and personality and I want to use them instead of rotting away in this dull hole’, a sentiment with which many women watching the film, war-weary and burdened with household duties, would have been able to empathize. Indeed, the sequences in which she pretends to play a newly pious woman for the benefit of the religious elderly servant Hogarth (Felix Aylmer) who has found out about her murderous career, have a likeable black humour to them; while they kneel and pray together, Barbara is secretly poisoning him with doctored home-made fruit cordial which Hogarth had taken to be a sign of her new commitment to domesticity. When he recovers and threatens to denounce her, she finally dispatches him with a pillow over the face in one of the film’s most shocking scenes. All of this was quite a departure for Margaret Lockwood. Subsequently, she would always be associated in the public mind with her role as the errant Lady Skelton, beauty spot and heaving décolletage to the fore. Prior to this film, however, she had more often played the briskly sensible girl-next-door, most famously in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), than the ruthless vamp. The film critic Leonard Mosley found her sudden transformation rather implausible – ‘I just cannot believe in Miss Margaret Lockwood as a femme fatale … what I see is no wicked lady, but a nice ordinary girl’ – but it was precisely that element of suburban middle-class ordinariness still visible through the wickedness that made Barbara such an iconic figure for young British women in the 1940s. (4) In addition to Lockwood, The Wicked Lady also had the considerable advantage of a starring role for James Mason, who plays Barbara’s partner-in-crime and lover, the dashing highwayman Jerry Jackson. Mason was Gainsborough’s top male star (closely followed by Stewart Granger) and his trademark was a brooding Byronic manner, often intermingled with an air of brutality towards women: he had thrashed Margaret Lockwood’s character to death with a riding crop in the earlier Gainsborough hit The Man in Grey and had smashed a walking cane onto Ann Todd’s hands as she played the piano in the non-Gainsborough melodrama The Seventh Veil (1945). Such acts of on-screen cruelty seemed to make Mason even more attractive to female audiences, and as Peter William Evans points out, ‘the popularity of an actor characterised by sadistic behaviour towards women raises important questions about spectatorship and masochistic audience identification.’ (2001: 113) But Mason is slightly different in The Wicked Lady with a performance defined less by sadism than a roistering Merrie England sexuality, coupled with a ready wit. The saucy badinage between Jackson and Barbara is one of the most enjoyable things about this film, at times even verging on Carry On-style innuendo: when Barbara pleads with her lover during one of their robberies to load up another chest of gold bullion, saying ‘Oh, just one more’, Jackson replies, with sardonic raised eyebrow, ‘I’ve heard you say that in other circumstances.’ The sexual frankness of the film, notable for its time, is evident from the sequences set on Barbara’s wedding night, with dialogue referring directly to the impending consummation of the marriage (To the bride: ‘Aren’t you scared?’; To the groom: ‘Into the fray, you lucky hound.’). But it was bodily display rather than bawdy dialogue that caused the film the greater problems when it was due to be released in the USA, and in order to conform to the demands of the Production Code, scenes had to be re-shot so that cleavage was far less conspicuous. Joe Breen, head of the Production Code Association (PCA) was scandalised by ‘fifty scenes showing the breasts of several of the women partially and ‘substantially’ uncovered.’ (in Street 2002: 121). Of course, Barbara cannot be allowed to escape punishment for her evil deeds and the penultimate sequence of the film shows her undone by her own scheming. She makes the mistake of holding up one last coach (containing her true love Kit, Ralph, and Caroline) and is shot by Kit, who fails to recognise her in her male highwayman disguise. Mortally wounded, she staggers back to her bedchamber through the secret passage that has enabled her to carry out her double life. Later, Kit visits her to tell her the good news (that Ralph will grant her a divorce so they can finally be married) but finds a dying woman. Barbara’s deathbed confession (‘I’m wicked. All my life I’ve cheated to get what I wanted. I had to have excitement. That’s why I took to the road’) repulses Kit and, despite Barbara pleading with him to stay with her, he leaves her to die alone. Her final isolation is underlined by the camerawork, as a crane shot takes us up and away from the dying Barbara, before cutting to an exterior view framing her final agonies through the window of her room, alone and abandoned. Despite its remarkable success, Gainsborough melodrama fell into decline by the late 1940s, partly because of new studio head Sydney Box’s preference for social realism over flamboyant fantasy, but also as a result of larger historical forces: the moment of its relevance to audiences had passed. During the Second World War, Pam Cook argues, ‘short-term sexual relationships, adultery and illegitimate births flourished: sex, passion and the drama of emotional life were brought to the fore, breaking up family unity’ (2005: 82) and these sea changes in British society were reflected, indirectly through the cloak of historical distance, by the taboo-breaking behaviour of the heroines of Gainsborough melodrama. Barbara Skelton, an independent woman acting upon her sexual desires and thriving on danger, may ostensibly belong to the late seventeenth century, but she is also very much a heroine of wartime Britain.
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