Femininity in The Frame

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 vii
Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements xi
General Editor’s Introduction xiii
Introduction: Women and the 1950s 1

1. Man-Made Women 15
2. The British Femme Fatale 41
3. The Comedy-of-Marriage Film 67
4. The Female Group Film 97

5. The Figure of the Prostitute 123
6. Female Film Critics 149
Conclusion: Reconfiguring 1950s Femininity 173

Notes 175
Bibliography 201
Selective Filmography 211
Index 215
viii femininity in the frame
illustrations ix
Illustrations
1. Pamela Devis as Olga in The Perfect Woman (1949) 22

2. The Perfect Woman (1949) – inspecting ‘the perfect woman’ 24
3. Ritter (Paul Henreid) transforms Lily (Lizabeth Scott) in 30
Stolen Face (1952)
4. ‘Amazing – is it possible?’ – reproducing women in Four 35
Sided Triangle (1953)
5. Greta Gynt as the ‘Shady Lady Spiv’ in Easy Money (1948) 50
6. Emmy entices David in Daughter of Darkness (1948) 61
7. Kenneth More in Raising a Riot (1955) 81
8. John Gregson consoles Peggy Cummins in To Dorothy a 84
Son (1954)
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
x femininity in the frame
acknowledgements xi
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
xii femininity in the frame
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 xi
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 Ob-
servation 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
xii femininity in the frame
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
2 femininity in the frame
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
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
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 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 birth-
rate.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
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 ‘divorce-
mindedness’ 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’,
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 semi-
skilled 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 middle-
class 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
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 extra-
marital sex, but it is clear from the debates concerning not only female
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
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
‘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
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
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
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.
man-made women 15
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.
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
man-made women 17
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),
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 Hammer-
Lippert 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 lower-
budgeted, 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
man-made women 19
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 under-
appreciated 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
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
man-made women 21
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 self-
destructs, 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
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
man-made women 23
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,
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, icy-
blue and petunia’). Secondly, an assortment of day dresses where the
fitted jacket and expansive swirling material of the skirt evokes Dior’s
man-made women 25
‘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
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
man-made women 27
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
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
man-made women 29
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.
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, hair-
style, 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.
man-made women 31
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
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
man-made women 33
endless ways’.37 It typically includes ‘before and after’ scenes where the
physical appearance of a young woman is transformed through dress-
fittings 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
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
man-made women 35
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
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 inter-
changeable’.42 In a similar vein, Landy suggests that ‘[t]he focal point of
man-made women 37
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
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-of-
control 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.
man-made women 39
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 proto-
feminist 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
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 vis-
à-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.
the british femme fatale 41
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.
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’ much-
quoted 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 black-
market 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
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 film-
making 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
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 hair-
styles, 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
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.
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
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
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.
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 voice-
over, 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
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-give-
give’). 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.
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 ‘self-
absorbed 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
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’.
Spurred on by this ‘clue’, Lee continues searching for more evidence of

his wife’s infidelity, and quickly finds numerous cards in the dressing-
table 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 post-
war 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
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,
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 contra-
dictory. She clearly exhibits a sexuality that attracts men to her and
they die because of it. Whilst never a sexual aggressor, she is evidently
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 nineteenth-
century Glasgow, Todd plays the titular heroine Madeleine, the eldest
daughter of an upper-class family who, like all heroines, must negotiate
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
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
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 lower-
class 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
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 alien-
invader 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,
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:
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
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
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 lower-
class 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
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
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 post-
war 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 post-
war 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.
the comedy-of-marriage film 67
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.
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
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 war-
time 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
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 middle-
class 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
home to be run in new and efficient ways.24 In the ‘modern’ home, dust-
collecting 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 birth-
rate 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
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
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 couple-
centred 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
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
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-of-
marriage 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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 washing-
line 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’
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 hour-
glass 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
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 proto-
feminist 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 voice-
over 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
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
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 tea-
towel 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 full-
time 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
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,
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.
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
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
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 voice-
over 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,
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 proto-
feminist 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
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.
the female group film 97
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
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 female-
dominated 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?
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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, middle-
aged 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
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.
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 socio-
political 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
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
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
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
hardship faced by Jean and all the women. Jean can enter into a post-
war 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
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 middle-
class 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
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
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
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 cinema-
goers. 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
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
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-in-
prison 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
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 women-
in-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 women-
in-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
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 re-
establish 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
compromise and ambiguity that motivated British cinema-goers in the

1950s. At a time when British cinema was producing fewer female-
centred 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.
the figure of the prostitute 123
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.
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 double-
bill 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 post-
war 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
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 family-
friendly 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
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 pre-
and 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.
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 Chatter-
ley’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 socio-
sexual framework at this time.18
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 pre-
existing 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
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
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 socio-
economic 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.
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 wear-
ing 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
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
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 ‘by-
product 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.
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 deep-
seated 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 middle-
class 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
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
(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 shop-
soiling 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 pre-
marital 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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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 female-
centred melodrama was in short supply. It is likely that Marissa’s status
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 middle-
aged 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.
female film critics 149
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
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
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
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.
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
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’.
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 cross-
class 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
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
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
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 tea-
tables 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
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 feminine-
angled, 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
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 male-
dominated 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
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
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
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
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
‘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
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
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:
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 twenty-
four 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
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
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,
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.
chapter title 173
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 low-
budget 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
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.
notes 175
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.
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
notes 177
to 43 per cent in 1951 (Langhamer, ‘The Meaning of Home in Postwar

Britain’, p. 359).
31 Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work
(London, 1956), pp. 27–41.
32 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).
34 Wilson, Women and the Welfare State, p. 66.
35 Mary Macaulay, The Art of Marriage (London, 1952), p. 33.
36 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.
37 Harriett Gilbert, ‘Growing Pains’, in Liz Heron (ed) Truth, Dare or
Promise: Girls growing up in the 50s (London, 1985), p. 54.
38 Sylvia Syms in Brian McFarlane, (1997) An Autobiography of British
Cinema (London, 1997), p. 549.
39 Deborah Philips and Ian Haywood, Brave New Causes: Women in British
Postwar Fictions (London, 1998), pp. 80–81.
40 Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, pp. 22–5.
41 Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds) Moments of
Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–1964 (London, 1999), pp. 1–3.
42 Conekin, Moments of Modernity, p. 20.
43 Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain, p. 166.
44 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.
45 Mass Observation, ‘Why do they go to the Pictures?’, Mass Observation
Reprint, Vol. 1 No. 19 (London: Mass Observation, November 1950),
p. 1.
46 Mass Observation, ‘Why do they go to the Pictures?’, p. 3.
47 Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline
of Deference (Oxford, 2003), p. 244.
48 Harper and Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s, p. 247.
49 T. Cauter and J. S. Downham, The Communication of Ideas: A Study of
Contemporary Influences on Urban Life (London, 1954), p. 125.
51 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.
52 Maltby, ‘“A Brief Romantic Interlude”, p. 443.
53 Vincent Porter, ‘Reviews’, Screen 42: 4 (Winter 2001), p. 408.
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.
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.
Postwar Fictions (London, 1998), pp. 25–6.
9 Philips and Haywood, Brave New Causes, pp. 25–6.
notes 179
10 Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton,

New Jersey, 1991), p. 395.
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.
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.
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.
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
49 See the ‘Mouse’ films discussed by Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties,
p. 60.
notes 181
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.
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.
17 Bedelia press book, held at the BFI Library. Haffenden had achieved
notable recognition for her flamboyant designs for Gainsborough’s
costume melodramas.

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
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.
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
notes 183
Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (eds) Play it Again, Sam: Retakes on

Remakes (California, 1998), p. 4.
40 Dyer, ‘Resistance Through Charisma’, p. 121.
41 Janey Place, ‘Women in Film Noir’, in Kaplan, Women in Film Noir,
p. 56.
42 Place, ‘Women in Film Noir’, p. 56.
43 Spicer, Film Noir, p. 184.
44 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.
46 Spicer, Sydney Box, p. 125.
47 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.
48 Martin, ‘Gilda’, p. 209.
49 Brian McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema (London, 1997), p.
562.
50 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).
51 Brian McFarlane, The Encyclopedia of British Film (London, 2003), p.
670.
52 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.
53 As with Easy Money, Daybreak was produced by Sydney Box and co-
scripted 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).
54 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).
55 James Maxfield quoted in ‘Introduction’, Kaplan, Women in Film Noir,
p. 5.
56 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
canon. See Alain Silver and James Ursini, David Lean and His Films (Los
Angeles, 1991) and Kevin Brownlow, David Lean: A Biography (1996).
57 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.
58 Doane, Femmes Fatales, p. 1.
59 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.
60 Ruth Barton, Irish National Cinema (London, 2004), p. 80.
61 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.
63 See the Daughter of Darkness press book, held at the BFI Library.
65 Daughter of Darkness press book.
66 ‘Daughter of Darkness’. Rev. Times, 28 January 1948.
67 McFarlane, Lance Comfort, p. 86.
68 Gledhill, ‘Klute 1’, p. 29.
69 Stott, The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale, p. 68.
70 Gledhill, ‘Klute 1’, p. 29.
72 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.
notes 185
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.
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.
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.
13 BFHG, ‘Feminism as Femininity’, p. 49.
14 Summerfield, ‘Women in Britain since 1945’, p. 60.
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
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.
21 Langhamer, ‘The Meaning of Home in Postwar Britain’, p. 360.
23 Winship, ‘Woman Becomes an “Individual”’, p. 17.
24 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary
Culture (London, 1994), pp. 51–2.
25 Samuel, Theatres of Memory, pp. 48–55.
26 ‘Mechanised’. Picture Post, 18 March 1950, pp. 48–55.
29 Paul Addison, Now the War is Over: A Social History of Britain 1945–51
(London, 1985), p. 57.
30 Susan Haywood, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, second edn (London,
2000), p. 73.
31 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.
of Deference (Oxford, 2003), p. 107.
33 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.
34 Spicer, ‘The “other war”’, pp. 167–82.
35 Raymond Durgnant, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity
to Affluence (London, 1970), p. 181.
36 Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio
System (Australia & New Zealand, 1981), p. 155.
37 Cited in Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, Affairs to Remember:
The Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes (Manchester, 1989), p. 39.
38 Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre
(London, 2007), p. 13.
39 Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981), p. 2.
40 Babington and Evans, Affairs to Remember, p. 24.
44 Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity on Popular
British Cinema (London, 2001), p. 93.
notes 187
45 The action in Father’s Doing Fine (1952) centres on an imminent birth

and was scripted by Anne Burnaby.
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.
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.
67 Quoted in Harper, Women in British Cinema, p. 194.
68 Steve Chibnall, J. Lee Thompson (Manchester, 2000), p. 53.
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
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.
71 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’.
72 Brian McFarlane, The Encyclopedia of British Film (London, 2003),
p. 116.
73 Quoted in Langhamer, ‘The Meaning of Home in Postwar Britain’,
p. 360.
74 Quoted in Jackie Byars, All That Hollywood Allows: Re-reading Gender in
1950s Melodrama (London, 1991), p. 75.
75 Quoted in Byars, All That Hollywood Allows, p. 75.
80 ‘Young Wives’ Tale’. Rev. Picture Show 10 November 1951.
81 ‘Young Wives’ Tale’. Rev. Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1951, p. 300.
82 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.
83 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.
84 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).
85 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.
notes 189
Notes to Chapter 4
1 Virginia McKenna in Brian McFarlane, An Autobiography of British

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.
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.
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.
22 Basinger, The World War II Combat Film, p. 75.
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.
notes 191
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).
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).
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 extra-
marital 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.
notes 193
25 Joanna Phoenix, Making Sense of Prostitution (Basingstoke, Hampshire,

2001), pp. 25–26.
26 Wolfenden Report, p. 20.
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.

42 Haste, Rules of Desire, p. 160.
43 Haste, Rules of Desire, p. 160.
44 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.
45 Gorer, Exploring English Character, p. 98.
46 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).
47 Cited in Haste, Rules of Desire, p. 159.
48 Langhamer, ‘Adultery in Post-War England’, p. 88.
51 Kinematograph Weekly, August 8, 1957.
52 Kinematograph Weekly, August 22, 1957.
53 Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to
Affluence (London, 1970), p. 195.
54 Kinematograph Weekly, 25 July 1957.
55 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular
Literature (Chapel Hill, 1991), p. 140.
‘New Look’ (London, 2000), pp. 22–5.
59 Trotter, Cooking with Mud, p. 8.
61 Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London, 1971), p. 2.
62 Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 5.
63 Winnicott quoted in Michael Jacobs, D. W. Winnicott (London, 1995),
p. 52.
65 Kinematograph Weekly quoted in Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, p. 192
66 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.
notes 195
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
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.
11 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.
12 Holmes, British TV & Film Culture in the 1950s, pp. 52–9.
13 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).
14 John Ellis, ‘Art, Culture and Quality, Terms for a Cinema in the Forties
and Seventies’, Screen 19: 3 (1978), pp. 20–31.
15 ‘In Which We Serve’. Rev. Woman, 2 January 1943, p. 14.
16 Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women,
1930–1960 (London, 1994), p. 20.
17 Winship, ‘Femininity and Women’s Magazines’, p. 14.
18 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.
19 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).
20 ‘Brief Encounter’. Rev. Woman, 9 February 1946.
21 ‘Perfect Strangers’. Rev. Woman, 6 October 1946.
notes 197
22 ‘Now Voyager’. Rev. Woman, 1 January 1944.

23 ‘My Reputation’. Rev. Woman, 17 August 1946.
24 ‘They Were Sisters’. Rev. Woman, 3 June 1945.
25 Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume
Film (London, 1994), p. 142.
26 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).
27 ‘So Bright the Flame’. Rev. Woman, 5 July 1952, p. 18.
28 ‘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.
29 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).
30 ‘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).
31 ‘Woman in a Dressing Gown’, broadcast script for BBC’s The Critics
(BBC WAC, The Critics microfiche).
32 ‘Woman in a Dressing Gown’.
33 Catherine de la Roche, Performance (Palmerston North, New Zealand,
1988), p. 45.
34 De la Roche, Performance, p. 45.
35 De la Roche, Performance, p. 46.
36 Catherine de la Roche, ‘The Mask of Realism’, Penguin Film Review 7
(Middlesex, England, 1948), pp. 37–9.
37 De la Roche, ‘That “Feminine Angle”’, Penguin Film Review 8 (Middlesex,
England, 1949), p. 27.
38 De la Roche, ‘That “Feminine Angle”’, p. 31.
42 De la Roche, ‘That Feminine Angle’, p. 32.

43 De la Roche, ‘That “Feminine Angle”’, pp. 28–9.
45 Ellis, ‘Art, Culture and Quality’, p. 19.
46 Catherine de la Roche, ‘H. G. Wells and the Cinema’ (1949), script for
the Central Office of Information (held at the BFI Special Collections).
47 Catherine de la Roche, ‘Carol Reed’, script for the BBC’s Third Programme,
broadcast 12 June 1948 (held at the BFI Special Collections).
48 ‘Odd Man Out’. Rev. Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1947, p. 47.
49 Richard Winnington, ‘Odd Man Out’. Rev. 1947 reprinted in Drawn
and Quartered (London, 1949), pp. 78–9.
50 Dilys Powell, ‘Odd Man Out’. Rev. 1947 reprinted in The Dilys Powell
Film Reader (ed Christopher Cook) (Oxford, 1991), p. 9.
51 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).
52 Shingler, ‘Interpreting All About Eve’, p. 3.
53 ‘All About Eve’. Rev. Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1951, p. 199.
54 C A Lejeune, ‘A Star at Eve’. Rev. The Observer, 10 December 1950,
p. 6.
55 Catherine de la Roche, ‘Davis Versus Eve’. Picture Post, 9 December
1950, p.18.
56 Catherine de la Roche, private correspondence to Talks Department, 9
August 1948 (held at the BBC WAC, Catherine Cameron File I, 1941–49).
58 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).
59 Memo to David Wolfers from J. S., 20 September 1948 (BBC WAC,
Talks, Catherine Cameron File I, 1941–49).
60 Memo from R. E. Keen (Talks Department) to J. Quigley, 8 October
1951(BBC WAC R51/173/4, Catherine Cameron File II, 1950-59).
March 1949 (BBC WAC, Catherine Cameron File I, 1941–49).
1945–1968 (London, 1980), p. 181.
March 1949 (BBC WAC, Catherine Cameron File I, 1941–49).
65 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).
notes 199
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’ (To-
Day’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 counter-
appeal 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).
73 Robertson, ‘A Woman’s Film’.
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Stanley, Liz, Sex Surveyed, 1949–1994: From Mass Observation’s ‘Little Kinsey’
to the National Survey and the Hite Reports (London: Taylor & Francis,
1995).
Steedman, Carolyn, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives
(London: Virago, 1986).
‘Stolen Face’. Rev. Kinematograph Weekly, 23 April 1953, p. 24.
Stott, Rebecca, The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale (Basingstoke,
Hampshire: Macmillan, 1992).
Summerfield, Penny, ‘Approaches to Women and Social Change in the Second
World War’, in B. Brivati and H. Jones (eds) What Difference Did the War
Make? (London: Leicester University Press, 1993), pp. 63–79.
— ‘Women in Britain since 1945: Companionate Marriage and the Double
Burden’, in J. Obelkevich and P. Catterall (eds) Understanding Post-War
British Society (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 58–72.
— Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral
Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1998).
Tasker, Yvonne, Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Culture
Thane, Pat, ‘Family Life and “Normality” in Postwar British Culture’, in R.

Bessel and D. Schumann (eds) Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural
and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 193–210.
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and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Vesselo, Arthur, ‘British Films of the Quarter’, Sight and Sound 16: 62
(Summer 1947a), pp. 76–77.
— ‘British Films of the Quarter’, Sight and Sound 16: 63 (Autumn 1947b),
pp. 120–21.
‘The Weak and the Wicked’. Rev. Kinematograph Weekly, 14 January 1954,
p. 19.
Weeks, Jeffrey, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800
(London: Longman, 1989).
Williams, Melanie, ‘Women in Prison and Women in Dressing Gowns:
Rediscovering the 1950s films of J. Lee Thompson’, Journal of Gender
Studies 11: 1 (2002), pp. 5–15.
Wilson, Elizabeth, Women and the Welfare State (London: Tavistock, 1977).
— Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain 1945–1968 (London:
Tavistock, 1980).
Winnicott, Donald W., Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1971).
Winnington, Richard, Drawn and Quartered (London: The Saturn Press,
1949).
Winship, Janice, ‘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).
— ‘Femininity and Women’s Magazines, a case study of Woman’s Own –
“First in Britain for Women”’, in The Changing Experience of Women,
Unit 6 (Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, 1983).
Wolfenden, Sir John, Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and
Prostitution (London: HMSO, 1957).
Wollen, Peter, ‘Riff-Raff Realism’, Sight and Sound April 1998, pp. 18–22.
‘Woman in a Dressing Gown’. Rev. Kinematograph Weekly, 26 September
1957, p. 17
Wright, Helena, (1947) ‘More About the Sex Factor in Marriage’, extract
reprinted in L. A. Hall (ed) Outspoken Women: An Anthology of women’s
writing on sex, 1870–1969 (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 261–63.
‘Young Wives’ Tale’. Rev. Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1951, p. 300.
‘Young Wives’ Tale’. Rev. Picture Show, 10 November 1951.
Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Ina (ed) Women in Twentieth-Century Britain
(Harlow, Essex: Longman, 2001).
selective filmography 211
Selective Filmography
This filmography lists alphabetically a select number of British feature-

length 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. *Co-
screenwriter 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.
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. *Co-
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.
selective filmography 213
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. *Co-
Take My Life (1947), director Ronald Neame, producer Anthony Havelock-

Allen, 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 Black, George 21

Adam’s Rib 74, 82 black-market economy 42, 50
adult–child relationship 71–2 Blade Runner (Scott) 20
Aldrich, Robert 119 Blanche Fury 43
alien women 19 Blithe Spirit 21, 73
see also foreignness body parts revitalized 19, 20
All About Eve (Mankiewicz) 153, Bogarde, Dick 72, 149
156, 163, 164, 170 Bogart, Humphrey 31
Allen, Walter 156, 157 ‘Bond’ novels 127
An Alligator Named Daisy 73, 75 Bould, Mark 23
Allyson, June 155 Boulting brothers 72
Ambler, Eric 162, 170 Bowlby, John 2, 6
Anderson, Jean 106 Box, Betty 164
Anderson, Lindsay 2, 149, 150 Box, Muriel 95–6, 150, 164, 174
Arnold, Malcolm 32 To Dorothy a Son 67, 75–6,
Aspinall, Sue 42, 46, 58, 65 81–7, 101
Associated British Picture Easy Money 49
Corporation 87, 114 feminism 12
atomic threat 16, 17 Simon and Laura 73, 76, 96
audiences Street Corner 101
costume 32, 138 The Truth About Women 188n85
identification 105, 120–1 Box, Sidney 49, 81, 101
statistics 10–11 Bride of Frankenstein 37
women 98, 138, 166 The Bridge on the River Kwai (Lean)
The Awful Truth 73–4 32
Brief Encounter 153, 154
Brighton Rock 42
Babington, Bruce 44, 48, 76, 80, Bringing Up Baby 73, 74
93 British Lion 123
Bacall, Lauren 160 British Medical Association 127
Banzie, Brenda de 132 British popular cinema
Barr, Charles 2 audiences 10–11
Barton, Ruth 60 comedy 72–6
Basinger, Jeanine 97, 108, 153 commercial success 11–12
BBC radio 161, 164–6, 167 critiques 2
Beat Girl 72 female group film 99–105
Becker, Jacques 131–2 feminism 3, 4
Bedelia (Comfort) 44–5, 46, 63 femme fatale 41, 42–4, 46–7,
Beveridge, William 5, 41, 68, 70 65–6
Bevin, Ernest 71 marriage comedies 13, 67, 74–6
Bhaji on the Beach 99 modernity 139–42
birth-rate 6, 9, 17, 71 prostitute figure 130–3
The Bishop’s Wife 47 sexuality 46–7
social imaginary 3 housework 70

British quality cinema 152, 154, mess 142
162–3 prostitutes 131
British Social Biology Council 128 sexuality 23–4, 51–2, 64
Brittain, Vera 5 clothes: see costume
The Brothers 46 cold war politics 17
Brothers-in-Law 72 The Colditz Story 100
Bryan, Dora 131 Collins, Joan 113
Burnaby, Anne 174 comedy genre 72–6
irony 12, 76 accidents 73, 93
Operation Bullshine 96 cross-dressing 25–6
sexual politics 67, 76 depictions of women 3, 27, 94
and Skutezky 87 family life 71–6
The Weak and the Wicked 114, marriage 13, 67
116–17, 120 prostitute figure 131
screwball comedy 67
Comfort, Lance
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari Bedelia 44–5, 46, 63
(Lubitsch) 20 Daughter of Darkness 43, 46, 47,
Caffin, Yvonne 52 59–65
camerawork 156 The Common Touch 48
Carrick, Edward 165 Commonwealth 10
Carroll, Madeleine 47 companionate marriage
Carry On Sergeant 72 female agency 13–14
Carve Her Name With Pride 100 female friendship 98
Casablanca 31, 153 female sexuality 127
Caspary, Vera 44 gender roles 6, 67, 69–70
Casque d’or (Becker) 131–2 Compton Bennett, H. W. 54
Cass, Henry 67, 75–6, 87–95 Conekin, Becky 10
see also Young Wives’ Tale confession mode 63, 64
castration anxiety 29 Conservative government 13
Caught 155 The Constant Husband 74
Cavell, Stanley 73, 82 Constantine, Eddie 124, 132
censorship 17, 123 control 40, 41
Central Office of Information 161, see also power
162 Coronation 10, 13, 127
Chaffey, Don 123, 134–9, 191n3 costume
see also The Flesh is Weak copying 52
Chaplin, Charlie 26, 149 Daughter of Darkness 62–3
Cherry, Helen 87, 89 excesses 25
Chesser, Eustace 130, 136 female audience 138
chiaroscuro lighting 51 female gaze 32
Chibnall, Steve 18, 116 feminization 80
child development 2, 6, 139–40 glamour 49
child welfare 68, 101 perfection 33
child welfare clinics 17 signalling difference 143
childcare 70, 78 transformation narrative 32–3,
Cineguild 46 113–14
cinematography, noir 52 costume designers 32, 52, 165, 173
class differences costume drama 41, 42, 155
birth-rate 17 Cover Girl Killer 147
fantasy 73 Crabtree, Arthur 51
femininity 32 see also Dear Murderer
index 217
Craigie, Jill 164 desire

Crawford, Anne 60, 101 destructiveness 34
Crawford, Joan 18 and duty 41
creative work 79, 124, 188n85 female 126, 136–7
crime films 4, 43, 147 lesbian 117–19, 120
criminality 28–9, 41, 43, 45 male 3, 28, 31, 34, 38, 39
crisis scenarios 100–1 man-made women 20–1
The Critics 150, 156, 157, 170, repression 56
197n28 destructiveness 34
cross-dressing 25–6 Devil Girl from Mars 18
see also transvestism Devis, Pamela 21, 25
Crowther Report 6–7 Dillon, Carmen 165
Cukor, George 18 divorce 6, 83
Cummins, Peggy 82, 85, 101–2 Doane, Mary Ann 53, 57, 62, 65
Curtis Committee 68 Doctor in the House 77
documentary realism 152
Do-It-Yourself manuals 71
Daily Express 43 Dolan, Josie 111
Daily Mail 149, 167 The Doll (Lubitsch) 20
Daily Sketch 149 domestic servants 70
Daily Worker 149 domesticity 2
The Dam Busters 17–18, 72, 100 age differences 63, 64
Dance Hall 41 and creative work 79
Daughter of Darkness (Comfort) 43, and exotic 63
46, 47, 59–65 femininity 157
Davis, Bette 31, 153, 160, 163 gender differences 92–3
Daybreak (Compton Bennett) 43, Langhamer 185n4
46, 47, 54–6, 55 sexuality 44–5
De la Roche, Catherine 149, 174 skills 115
‘Anna Magnani’ 165, 166 Young Wives’ Tale 67
autobiography 159 doppelgängers 19
BBC radio 164–6 Dors, Diana 4, 114–15, 132, 143,
gender relations 12, 95, 150 146
‘H. G. Wells and the Cinema’ double entendres 22–3
162 Double Indemnity 153
‘The Mask of Realism’ 159–60 double standards 8, 135
‘Modern Heroine’ 165 doubling 37, 143
National Council of Women Douglas, Mary 126, 133, 136, 137
166 Dragonwyck 39
Penguin Film Review 149, 152, drudgery 91
158, 159–60, 161 Dunning, Emily 155
Reed 162–3, 164 duplicity 52–3
‘That “Feminine Angle”’ 159– Durgnat, Raymond 73, 138
60 duty/desire 41
Woman 161 Dyer, Richard 49–50
‘Women and Cinema’ 165
Women’s Guild lectures 166
Dead of Night 153 Ealing productions 17, 46, 72, 159
Dear Murderer (Crabtree) 43, 45, Easy Money (Knowles) 46, 47,
46, 47–8, 51–4 49–50, 173
defamiliarization 77, 84–5 Economic Survey (1947) 7, 41
dehumanization 26 education 6–7, 9
Derek, John 124, 132 Emergency Ward 10 169
employment for women: see The Weak and the Wicked 98,
working women 114–20
ensemble playing 99 Westward the Women 97–8
equal but different concept 5, 67, female sexuality 8–10, 126–8
69, 101, 169 anxiety about 123
Eros productions 123 companionate marriage 127
eroticism 18, 20 The Flesh is Weak 146
eugenics 17 normative/divergent 133
Evans, Peter William 76, 80, 93 other 132
exoticism 31, 48 Passport to Shame 146–7
exploitation, sexual 130, 131, 135 transgression 66
extra-marital sex 8, 126, 136 The Feminine Touch 156
eye, power of 29 femininity
see also gaze cinematic 3, 4
class differences 32
domestic 157
facial disfigurement 28–9 emotional 94
The Fallen Idol (Reed) 131 glamour 52
fallen woman iconography 141, idealized 29, 38, 39
143 as masquerade 58–9
family motherhood 6, 67
comedy genre 71–6 normative/divergent 27, 90, 94,
post-war 5, 102–3 143
reconstruction of 68 performance of 26, 94
traditional model 5 physical appearance 104,
see also marriage 110–11, 167, 190n27
family allowance 5, 17, 70 plurality 104–5, 113, 114–15
Family Planning Association 8, 126 post-war reconstruction 5, 173
Fanny by Gaslight 123 respect for 80, 86–7
fantasy robotic 26
class differences 73 as spectrum 85–6, 87–8
eroticised 20 transgressive 45, 153
male 15, 23, 24, 28, 51 unruly 27
and reality 15, 29 feminist approach 1, 6, 12, 99, 153
romantic comedy 21 feminization 80, 85
Farr, Derek 87 femme fatale
fatalism 55 British popular cinema 4, 12,
father-figure 77, 78–9 13, 41, 42–4, 46–7, 65–6
female agency 2, 66, 109–12, 120 Doane on 57, 62
female body 146 frigidity 46
female bonding 108, 116 Gynt as 47–50, 65
see also female friendship; Lockwood as 43–4
homosociality as male fantasy 51
female friendship 98, 115–16, narcissism 51
117–18, 119 repressed 54–9
female group films 99–105 Stott on 63–4
destructive 100 studies of 47
dynamics 100–1, 106–9 Festival of Britain 16, 127
incarceration 112–20 film noir
police officers 101–4 American 18, 39, 43
solidarity 97–8 cinematography 52
A Town Like Alice 98, 100–1, sexuality 63
105–12 Spicer on 42
index 219
women’s roles 48, 63 conservatism 1, 5, 174

see also gothic noir De la Roche on 12, 159
film production, male-dominated female desire 137
160–1, 169 feminist relations 66, 109–12,
film reviews 12, 149–53, 170–1 120
De la Roche 158–66 male anxiety 13, 39–40, 121
Lockhart 153–8 male paranoia 43
Robertson 167–70 normative 81
Films and Filming 77, 149 public/private spheres 169
Finch, Peter 96, 105–6 in quality film 152
Fisher, Terence representation 124–5
Four-Sided Triangle 15, 18–19, gender roles
33–8 companionate marriage 6, 67,
Stolen Face 15, 18–19, 28–33, 69–70
36 crisis in 98
Fleming, Ian 127 differences 15, 92–3
The Flesh is Weak (Chaffey) 173 expanding 151–2
critical response 125–6 inverted 67, 77, 79–80, 83–4
female sexuality 146 post-war 33
foreign other 124–5, 132–3 public sphere 131, 155
mess/modernity 140–2 traditional 1, 2, 13, 68, 87,
non-marital sex 137–8 89–91
prostitute as heroine 123, 131, in transition 9, 10, 121
134–9 Genevieve 74–5, 76, 77, 94, 95
sexual politics 138–9 The Gentle Sex 98, 99
flighty woman stereotype 92 Geoffrey, Wallace 21
For Better, For Worse 73 Geraghty, Christine 3, 18, 74–5,
Forbes, Bryan 20 86, 94, 109
Ford, John 150 German Expressionists 20
foreignness 124–5, 132–3, 135 Gibbens, John 69
Four-Sided Triangle (Fisher) Gilbert, Harriett 9
desire/destruction 34 Gilda 49
homoeroticism 37–8 Giles, Judy 91
low budget 18 Gilliat, Sidney 72, 164–5
replicating machine 15, 34 The Girl in White 155
same-sex relations 36–7 glamour 49, 52
France 131 Glancy, Mark 163
Frankenstein 36 Gledhill, Christine 48, 63, 64
Frankenstein story 20 The Golem 20
Freud, Sigmund 29, 73 Good Housekeeping 149, 151, 159,
Friedan, Betty 1 167
frigidity 46, 54, 63 Good Time Girl 46, 101, 112, 130,
135, 156
Goter, Geoffrey 135
Gainsborough productions 42, 46, gothic noir 39, 43, 45, 48, 59–65
49, 52, 124, 155, 173 Grant, Elspeth 149
gatekeeping function 102–3 Great Day 98
gaze Green Years 167
appropriated 118–19 Greenwood, Joan 87, 89, 95
female 31, 32 Gregson, John 82, 85, 115
male 23, 29, 118–19 Guardian 43–4
gender politics 1, 76, 95, 119, 162 Gynt, Greta
gender relations 3, 4 Dear Murderer 46, 47, 51–4
Easy Money 46, 47, 49–50 Horton, Andrew 49

as femme fatale 47–50, 65 household appliances 70
outsider status 65 housewife role
Beveridge Report 68
female agency 2
Haffenden, Elizabeth 44, 52, 165 Marr on 1
Hall, Lesley A. 10, 67, 127 National Insurance Act 41
Hammer Studios 18, 19, 139, 146, normative 66
184n72 and paid work 69–70
Hammer-Lippert co-production 18 post-war Hollywood 77
The Happiest Days of Your Life 72, social-realism 67
100 housework 70, 76, 78, 91, 92–3,
Harper, Sue 11, 35–6, 42, 54, 76, 188n84
86, 139, 175n5 housing shortages 71, 87
Harris, Julie 165 Houston, Penelope 149
Harrison, Kathleen 113 ‘how-to’ manuals 69
Hayter, James 33–4 Hugget series 72, 164
Haywood, Ian 9, 72
Hayworth, Rita 49
Head, Edith 32 I Believe in You 72, 101, 131
Henreid, Paul 28, 31–2 illusion/disillusion 140, 141–2
Henry, Joan 114, 120 image production 52–3, 59
Hepburn, Audrey 88 imaginary
Hepburn, Katherine 153 cultural 15, 28
Heron, Joyce 118 male 19
heterosexuality sexual 18
marriage 13–14, 68, 71 social 3, 173
as norm 5 In Which We Serve 152
privileged 110, 126 incarceration films 4, 101, 112–20
A Town Like Alice 119 Independent Producers Ltd 19
Hibbin, Nina 149 intertextuality 49
Highly Dangerous 155 invasion narratives 17–18
Hill, John 67 Irish neutrality 60
Hinxman, Margaret 149 It Always Rains on Sunday 41, 66
History of Modern Britain (Marr) 1 Italy 132
Hitchcock, Alfred 30
Hoffman, E. T. A. 20
Holiday Camp 72 Jacqueline 72
Holloway, Stanley 21 Jeans, Ronald 87
Hollywood John, Rosamund 101
female gothic 39 Johns, Glynis 4, 114–15
film noir 18, 39, 43 Johnson, Lesley 77
post-war housewife 77 Jones, Robert 16
prostitute figure 132 Jordan, Robert Furneaux 156, 157
romantic comedy 74 Jordonova, Ludmilla 36
star system 97, 99
Home Front films 100, 109
hommes fatales 43 Kendall, Kay 3, 4, 74–5, 96, 153
homoeroticism 37–8 Kent, Jean 46
homosexuality 128 Keown, Eric 156, 157
see also lesbian desire The Killing of Sister George (Aldrich)
homosociality 37, 100 119
horror films 18, 19 Kind Hearts and Coronets 89
index 221
Kinematograph Weekly 12, 27, 33, The Critics 156–7, 170

78, 125, 138, 143, 156 domesticity 157–8
Kinsey Reports 8, 118, 126, 136 on Lockwood 44
Klein, Viola 7 Picturegoer 149, 153
Knowles, Bernard Woman 149, 151, 153–6
Easy Money 46, 47, 49–50, 173 on Woman in a Dressing Gown
The Perfect Woman 15, 18, 19, 151–2, 157–8, 170
21–8, 36, 173, 174 Woman’s Hour 151, 156
Kuhn, Annette 25, 67 Lockwood, Margaret
Babington on 44–5
Bedelia 44, 46, 63
labour division 69, 81, 91 critics on 43–4
Labour Party 13, 71 Highly Dangerous 155
labour-saving devices 70 Murphy on 46
The Lady 149 Lom, Herbert 132, 143
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence) Look Back in Anger 157
127 Loy, Myrna 160–1
The Ladykillers 72 The L-Shaped Room 147
Lambert, Gavin 44 Lubitsch, Ernst 20
landscape contrasts 60, 61 Lucky Jim 72
Landy, Marcia 36–7, 45, 77, 116
Lang, Fritz 20, 36
see also Metropolis Macaulay, Mary 8, 69
Langhamer, Claire 67, 71, 136, McKenna, Siobhan 46, 47, 59
185n4 McKenna, Virginia 3, 4, 97,
LaPlace, Maria 98 100–1, 105–7
Launder, Frank 72 Mackenzie, Mary 28
Laura (Caspary/Preminger) 44 Madeleine 43, 45, 46, 47, 54,
The Lavender Hill Mob 72 56–9, 173
Lawrence, D. H. 127 Madonna of the Seven Moons 41,
The Leader 47 66, 155
Leahy, Sarah 131 Madonna/whore dichotomy 2, 86
Lean, David male anxiety 13, 39–40
The Bridge on the River Kwai 32 male domination 15, 42–3
The Passionate Friends 54, 153, see also masculinity
162 male groups 100
and Todd 54 see also homosociality
Lee, Jack Malleson, Miles 21
A Town Like Alice 97, 98, Maltby, Richard 11, 104, 150
100–1, 105–12, 119, 173, 174 The Man in Grey 155
Turn the Key Softly 101, 113, The Man in the White Suit 17
131, 135 Mandy 67, 72
Leites, Nathan 42, 65 Mankiewicz, Joseph 163, 164
Lejeune, C. A. 149, 151, 163 see also All About Eve
lesbian desire 117–19, 120 man-made women 13, 15, 20–1,
Letter from an Unknown Woman 41
156 Mann, Anthony 18
life-span model 7 Manvell, Roger 152
Light, Alison 3, 5, 9, 15 Marr, Andrew 1
Lipscombe, Bill 105 marriage 9, 123
‘Little Kinsey’ Sex Survey 126, 128 comedy genre 13, 67, 74–6
Lloyd, Justine 77 heterosexuality 13–14, 68, 71
Lockhart, Freda Bruce ‘how-to’ manuals 69
opposing concepts of 90–1 Mosley, Leonard 43

welfare state 5–6 motherhood 2, 5, 6, 67, 167–8,
see also companionate marriage 199n69
Martin, Angela 53 The Mouse that Roared 18
Marwick, Arthur 16 Murphy, Robert 2, 4, 42, 43, 44,
masculinity 46, 48
anxieties 13, 39–40 Murray, Stephen 33
appropriation of 89–90, My Reputation 154
111–12 Myrdal, Alva 7
housework 92
normative 77–8
Mason, James 155 narcissism 51
Mass Observation narrator, male 57
‘Little Kinsey’ Sex Survey 126, National Council of Women 166
128 National Health Service 70, 101
marriage/family 68 National Insurance Act 5, 41
surveys 10–11, 12 National Marriage Guidance
‘Where is Science Taking Council 69, 126
Us?’ 16 Neagle, Anna 111, 160
masturbation 8 New Look 25
maternity benefit 5 new social order 2, 9–10
Maxfield, James 56 New Woman 3, 86
Mayne, Judith 115–16, 118 New Zealand Film Commission
mechanization 26 159
The Men in Grey 43 Newsom, John 6
mess 139–42, 145–6 Newton, Robert 163
Messina gang 133 Nicholson, Nora 106
Metropolis (Lang) 20, 26, 36 Night and the City 46
Mildred Pierce 153, 154, 168 No Times for Tears 101
Millions Like Us 98 noir film: see film noir; gothic noir
Ministry of Fear 153 noisy voices 1, 4, 171
Minnelli, Vincente 165 see also unruly woman
Miranda 21, 73 non-marital sex 135–6, 137–8
mise-en-scène 178n55 Norway 48
coffee bars 193n37 Now Voyager 31, 154, 155
‘fallen woman’ 143 nuclear fears 16, 17
sexuality 13
‘shop-soiled’ 145
misogynist attitudes 28, 86 Obscene Publications Act 127
Mitchell, Basil 21 Observer 149, 163
Mitchell, Yvonne 4, 113, 153, Obsession 43
156–7 obsessive love 53
Modern Times (Chaplin) 26 The October Man 43
modernity 18, 139–42, 145–6 Odd Man Out 162–3
Mona Lisa Smile 1–2 Odette 100
monstrosity 18, 31 older woman 63, 64, 108, 111
Monthly Film Bulletin 78, 95, 114, Oliver Twist 123
125, 163 One Night of Love 116, 117
morbid films 43 Operation Bullshine 72, 96, 100
More, Kenneth 77–8 oppositional texts 11–12, 174
Morey, Anne 115 Oram, Alison 118
Morris, Meaghan 195n4 orgasm 8, 126
Moseley, Rachel 32–3, 60, 176n28 Orwell, George 16, 26
index 223
otherness 31, 48, 132 195–6n10

outsider-figure 61, 64, 65, 117, Portman, Eric 51, 53, 54–5
132, 147 Powell, Dilys 149, 151, 163
power 46, 58
pregnancy before marriage 136
paranoia, male 43 pre-marital sex 8, 127, 135–6
parenting 71 Preminger, Otto 44
The Passionate Friends (Lean) 54, prisoner-of-war films 100
153, 162 Private’s Progress 72
Passport to Shame (Rakoff) professions for women 155–6
critical response 125–6 Profumo affair 13
female sexuality 146–7 prostitute figure 4, 12
foreignness 124, 132–3 British popular cinema 66,
mess 145–6 130–9
modernity 145–6 class differences 131
prostitute as heroine 123, 131, comic 131
142–6 Hollywood 132
patriarchy 97, 98, 115, 120 Italy 132
Patrick, Nigel 21, 87, 95 and ordinary women 123, 133,
Payton, Barbara 33, 38 134, 145
Penguin Books 127 as outsider 147
Penguin Film Review 170 pollution 133
De la Roche 149, 152, 158, psychological factors 134, 135,
159–60, 161 142, 143
Robertson 149, 167, 168 visibility 129–30
Perfect Strangers 154 Wolfenden Report 14, 123,
The Perfect Woman (Knowles) 15, 128, 131, 133, 134, 147
18, 19, 21–8, 36, 173, 174 prostitution
performance 26, 27, 48, 94 class differences 131
Perkins, T. E. 92 criminalization 128
Perkins, Tessa 1 foreignness 132–3, 135
Petticoat Pirates 100 organized 133
Phelan, Lyn 20, 31, 37 pollution 126, 133
Philips, Deborah 9 Wolfenden 128–9, 137
Phoenix, Pat 147 psychoanalytic model 29
physical appearance 104, 110–11, psychology of child development
167, 190n27 2, 6
Picture Post 71, 149, 161, 163, 170 public institutions 101
Picture Show 95 public role of women 131, 155
Picturegoer 12, 27, 38, 77, 149, public/private spheres 102, 104,
153 144–5, 169, 188
Pilkington Committee on pulp fiction 18
Broadcasting 166 purity 136, 137
Pink String and Sealing Wax 45, 46 Pygmalion trope 28–9
Place, Janey 51
plastic surgery 28–9
plastics 70–1, 180n40 The Quatermass Experiment 17
pleasure Quigly, Isabel 149
sexuality 8, 69, 126
spectatorship 25, 26
poisoning 45, 46, 182n19 racial conflict 132–3
pollution 126, 133, 136, 143 Radway, Janice 138
Porter, Vincent 11, 12, 76, 139, Raising a Riot (Toye) 67, 174
gender roles 96 Sandbrook, Dominic 127

labour division 81 satirical comedy 72
role reversal 75, 76–81, 92 Schatz, Thomas 74, 82, 94
Rakoff, Alvin 123, 124, 142–6 science and technology 16
see also Passage to Shame science fiction 4, 13, 18
Rank productions 47 science fiction cinema 17–19, 35–6
rationing 25, 42 scientist as comic figure 18, 21
The Rattle of a Simple Man 147 scopophilia 29
realism 98, 100, 152 Scott, Lizabeth 28, 32
reality 15, 29 Scott, Rebecca 46
Rebecca 39 Scott, Ridley 20
reconstructive surgery 28 screwball comedy 67, 73
Redgrave, Michael 17–18 Secret Beyond the Door 45
Reed, Carol Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 37
De la Roche on 162–3, 164, Sequence 149
170 service comedies 72, 100
The Fallen Idol 131 set design 165
Odd Man Out 162–3 Seven Days to Noon 17
Reed, Maxwell 55 The Seventh Veil 54
replicating machine 15, 34 sex education 123
repression 56 sex toy imagery 23, 24
reproductive science 15, 17, 19–20 sexual difference 169, 170
Richards, Jeffrey 156 sexual discourse 63, 64
Robertson, E. Arnot 174 Sexual Offences Act 129
BBC radio 167 sexual politics 100, 138–9, 159
Daily Mail 149, 167 sexuality
feminist view 95 British cinema 46–7
Good Housekeeping 149, 167 class differences 23–4, 51–2, 64
Penguin Film Review 149, 167, criminality 41
168 criminalized 118
private sphere 158 disruptive 127
sexual difference 170 domesticity 44–5
‘Woman and the Film’ 167 film noir 63
‘A Woman’s Film’ 167, 169–70 mainstream culture 123
Woman’s Hour 167, 168–9 and mise-en-scène 13
Roc, Patricia 21, 24, 27, 46 pleasure 69, 126
Rogers, Peter 86 power 46, 58
role reversal 67, 75–6, 84–5 transgression 63, 64–5
see also gender roles see also female sexuality
romantic comedy 21, 74 Seyler, Athene 114
romantic fiction 68–9 The Shakedown 147
Room at the Top 147 She’ll Be Wearing Pink Pyjamas 99
Rowe, Kathleen 27 Shelley, Mary 20
Royal Commission on Marriage and Shingler, Martin 163
Divorce 5–6, 68 shop soiled trope 135, 145
Royal Commission on Population shopping motif 32–3
68 Shute, Nevil 105
Sight and Sound 43, 48, 149
Signoret, Simone 132
St Trinian’s series 40, 72, 100 Simon and Laura (Box) 73, 76, 96
same-sex relations 8, 36–7 Sinclair, Dorothy 62
see also homoeroticism; Skutezky, Victor 87, 114
lesbianism Sloane, Olive 114
index 225
The Small Back Room 43 Tiger Bay 72

Smart, Carol 128 Time and Tide 44
So Bright the Flame 153, 155 To Dorothy a Son (Box) 67, 101
So Evil My Love 43, 45, 46 divorce 83
social mobility 30, 113 role reversal 75–6, 81–7
social realism 67, 156 transvestism 85
social-problem genre 99, 101, 105, wife/sex object 85–6, 95–6
112–13, 124 Today’s Cinema 33
soliciting 129 Todd, Ann
Some Like It Hot 25, 74 Daybreak 46, 47, 54–6
The Sound Barrier 54 as femme fatale 47, 54–9, 65
The Spanish Gardener 72 frigidity 54, 63
special mission films 100 Madeleine 46, 47, 56–9
The Spectator 149 So Evil My Love 46
spectatorship 18, 25, 26 A Town Like Alice (Lee) 173
see also audiences; gaze commercial success 174
Spicer, Andrew 42, 43, 48, 72, 75 female agency, curtailed 109–12
spider woman iconography 51 female group 98, 100–1, 105–9
The Spiral Staircase 45 gender-neutral publicity 105
Spiv cycle 42–3, 130 group dynamics 106–9
Stacey, Jackie 104 heterosexuality 119
Stanwyck, Barbara 44, 153 McKenna 97
star system 97, 99 Toye, Wendy 150
state interventions 101 gender relations 12
The Stepford Wives (Forbes) 1, 20 Raising a Riot 1, 67, 75–81, 92,
stereotyping 59, 92 96, 174
Stolen Face (Fisher) 15, 18, 28–33, trade magazines 12
36 transformation narrative 32–3,
Stott, Rebecca 63–4 113–14
Strange Impersonation 18 transgression
Street, Sarah 111 femininity 45, 153
Street Corner (Box) 101 performance 27
Street Offences Act 129 sexual 63, 64–5, 66
Stross, Raymond 123, 124 transvestism 74, 80, 85
Summerfield, Eleanor 102 Tribune 16
Summerfield, Penny 69 Trotter, David 126, 139, 142, 146
The Sunday Times 149 The Truth About Women (Box)
Syms, Sylvia 4, 9 188n85
Turn the Key Softly (Lee) 101, 113,
131, 135
Take My Life 48 Turner, Lana 160
Tasker, Yvonne 97, 117 Twice Round the Daffodils 75
Taylor, John Russell 168–9 Two Cities 19
teenagers 72 The Two Mrs Carrolls 39
They Made Me a Fugitive 42, 43 2,000 Women 98, 190n25
They Were Sisters 154
Thompson, J. Lee
and Burnaby 87, 120 unruly woman 27, 100
The Weak and the Wicked 87,
98, 101, 114–20, 130
Woman in a Dressing Gown Value for Money 73
67, 151–2, 153, 156–8, 170, vamp 47
197n30 Van Eyssen, John 33
venereal disease 126 critiques of 156–8

Versois, Odile 124, 132, 143 housewife/mother 67
Vertigo (Hitchcock) 30 Lockhart on 151–2, 157–8, 170
Vesselo, Arthur 43, 48, 181n8 A Woman’s Face 18
Vidor, King 165 Woman’s Hour 150, 170
villainy, female 42, 47–8 De la Roche 152, 153, 159,
see also criminality 164–6
Vitale, Milly 124, 132 Lockhart 151, 156
Robertson 153, 167, 168–9
Women of the Streets (British Social
War and Peace (Vidor) 165 Biology Council) 128
war films 3, 39, 100, 153–4 women police officers 101–2,
Warner, Jack 72 101–4
Waterloo Road 42 women-in-prison films: see
The Weak and the Wicked incarceration
(Thompson) women’s films 98, 154, 183–4n56
exploitation 130 Women’s Guild lectures 166
friendships 98, 101 women’s magazines 151–2
gender politics 87, 119, 120 working women
prison scenes 114–20 ambiguities 23
welfare state 5–6, 13, 17, 68, 101 dual duties 69–70
Wellman, William 97–8 education 7
Wells, H. G. 162 post-war 2, 9
Westward the Women (Wellman) welfare state 101
97–8 WWII 1
The Wicked Lady 43, 123, 155 The World Ten Times Over 147
Wilson, Elizabeth Wright, Helena 8
gender roles 2 Wyer, Reginald 52
housework 70
labour division 69
marriage 68 X-rating 125
noisy voices 1, 4, 171
sexual pleasure 8
Winnicott, D. W. 6, 17, 139–40 The Yellow Balloon 72
Winnington, Richard 152, 163 Yield to the Night 101, 112–13,
Winship, Janet 68, 70, 153 130, 156
Winters, Shelley 82 Young, Loretta 47
Withers, Googie 46 Young Wives’ Tale (Cass) 114
wives 5, 67, 85–6, 95–6 accidents 93
see also marriage domesticity 67
Wolfenden Report 12, 129–30, femininity 90, 94
193n30 gender roles 87, 89–91
prostitutes 14, 123, 128, 131, housework 75–6, 92–3
133, 134, 147 labour division 91
prostitution control 128–9, 137 marriage 88–9
psychological factors 134, 142, nanny 88–9
143 success 95, 174
Wolfenstein, Martha 42, 65
Wollen, Peter 42
Woman 44, 68, 149, 151, 153,
155–6, 161
Woman in a Dressing Gown
(Thompson) 153, 197n30

Femininity in The Frame - Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema (Cinema and Society) (PDFDrive)

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Cinema and Society series

Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present

Distributed in the United States and Canada

Copyright © 2010 Melanie Bell

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham

Introduction: Women and the 1950s 1

2. The British Femme Fatale 41

3. The Comedy-of-Marriage Film 67

4. The Female Group Film 97

6. Female Film Critics 149

Conclusion: Reconfiguring 1950s Femininity 173

1. Pamela Devis as Olga in The Perfect Woman (1949) 22

I am grateful to the School of English Literature, Language and

Film in 1950s British Cinema’ in M. Bell and M. Williams (eds) British

General Editor’s Introduction

In this refreshingly original and persuasively argued book, Melanie

Women and the 1950s

time as one of male backlash against women’s wartime gains; a position

The diversity of women’s experiences has led historians to increasingly

science fiction and crime melodramas, and when we consider films

Women in 1950s Britain – The Dependent Wife and Mother

The widespread understanding of the 1950s as a decade of conservatism

and domestic science remained a central feature of their curriculum.27

The Working Woman

In addition to women’s increased participation in the workforce and

sexuality but employment, divorce and birth-rates, that women’s life

unnerving.40 Becky Conekin et al. in their study of modernity in

The British Cinema Audience

‘counter-attraction’ of radio, television and theatre as the most cited

of female agency is balanced by certain narrative strategies which

Science and technology were important themes in the post-war years.

[a] scientist’s political opinions, it is assumed, his opinions on sociological

Alongside prestige, however, was a certain amount of anxiety about the

The contradictory discourses that shaped understandings of science

British Science Fiction Cinema

later success as the quintessential Hammer horror director.15 The Perfect

Men, Science and Reproduction

Whilst women as invaders from outer space is one example of what

prove difficult to control and ultimately their male creators come to

The Perfect Woman

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

man-made object, the display of her ‘constructed-ness’ allows us to

the Professor’s invention, it has another. As Mark Bould has suggested,

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

‘New Look’, fashionable and desired by many British women at the

truth’.26 Penelope’s performance of robotic femininity allows norms of

or male norms of femininity. Playing the role of robot allows her to

film addresses the needs of audiences that can be broadly categorized

Stolen Face – the Plastic Surgeon as Pygmalion Figure

In Stolen Face (1952), Philip Ritter (Paul Henreid) is a dedicated

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

Plastic surgery is only one aspect of Lily’s reconfiguration as Ritter’s

Ritter’s attempt to take his creation from the scientific domain

Face, where Ritter is convincing as a romantic hero who goes to great

Four Sided Triangle

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

rules’.40 In contrast to Lena’s more mobile features, Helen’s impassivity