Woman in a Dressing Gown
J Lee Thompson (1957)
The physical circumstances and domestic routines of the title character, Amy Preston (Yvonne Mitchell), are set out clearly – overemphatically – in the film’s opening sequence. She, her husband Jim (Anthony Quayle) and their late teenage son Brian (Andrew Ray) live in a poky flat in a London council block, where Amy is a whirling-dervish skivvy. Her inept attempts at cooking breakfast foreshadow a wide-ranging housekeeping incompetence that tries the patience of the two men, who expect a better standard of service. The music on the radio in the kitchen never stops playing; Amy never stops buzzing about; yet she never seems to gets anything done: unless she goes out, she’s still in her dressing gown at the end of the day. Jim has a mundane but busy office job – so busy that he has to work Sundays, or so he tells Amy. In fact, this is when he visits his mistress Georgie (Sylvia Syms), who’s also his secretary at the office. In Her Brilliant Career, a very enjoyable biography of various notable working women in the 1950s, Rachel Cooke makes admiring mention of Woman in a Dressing Gown and Sylvia Syms, whom Cooke interviewed for the book, describes J Lee Thompson and the writer Ted Willis as ‘proto-feminists’. The film, however, turns out not to be the straightforward piece of social realism I’d expected from the references in Her Brilliant Career; or from Pauline Kael’s judgment that it ‘carries unpretentiousness to a fault’ (her note is highly enthusiastic about the lead performance); or indeed from Woman in a Dressing Gown‘s first ten minutes. The psychological complexity that Thompson achieves is thanks partly to his intelligent direction but chiefly to Yvonne Mitchell’s portrait of Amy.
Ted Wills’s screenplay is adapted from his own television play, broadcast on ITV in 1956. He writes excellent dialogue but a combination of the acting conventions of the time and the weaker elements of the script tends to muddy the social waters of the film. Whereas Yvonne Mitchell’s gestures and accent – and her laugh – situate Amy convincingly at the uneasy cusp of working-class and lower-middle-class, Anthony Quayle and Andrew Ray seem a cut above. Quayle nevertheless gives an intelligent performance; he makes Jim Preston both authentically guilt-ridden and aware of his own dullness. The son Brian works in a factory but his social life and his girlfriend (Roberta Woolley) suggest that he’s slumming it in a blue-collar job. As played by Andrew Ray, it’s hard to believe that Brian would even bring the girlfriend back to his shamingly untidy home (to groove to jazz records), and especially surprising that he’s prepared for her to meet the mother whose slovenliness exasperates him. The role of Brian is rather crudely written: he’s thoughtlessly demanding and intolerant of Amy until, when he finds out about Jim’s affair, he abruptly changes sides so that there can be a melodramatic showdown between father and son.
In Her Brilliant Career, Sylvia Syms is also quoted as saying of the character she plays that:
‘… Georgie is only in love with Jim, the most boring man in the world, because her horizons are so limited. He’s her boss; he’s the only man she knows.’
This isn’t persuasive: why would the beautiful, assured Georgie, who appears to have a nice flat of her own, have such a desperately circumscribed social life (as distinct from a social life including various men to all of whom she was subservient)? Sylvia Syms’s playing of Georgie is more interesting than her retrospective reading of the role: Jim Preston fears Georgie will soon find a better catch and this is what Syms picks up on so well (it’s the best acting I’ve seen from her in her youth). She has a lovely emotional transparency but at the same time suggests that Georgie, while she’s committed wholeheartedly to Jim for now, will soon get over him – then commit wholeheartedly to someone else. In smaller roles, Carole Lesley is weak as Amy’s neighbour but there’s an excellent cameo from Olga Lindo, who plays the manageress of a hairdressing salon to which Amy pays a rare and ill-fated visit. There’s an eloquent exchange of looks between Lindo and Marianne Stone, as the stylist, when Amy leaves the hairdresser’s, her shampoo and set about to be immediately ruined in a downpour.
Willis and Thompson are somewhat opaque about the cause(s) of Jim’s unfaithfulness. The social comment side of Woman in a Dressing Gown may want to ascribe this to his wife’s increasing age and deteriorating appearance – but it has to be more than that. Amy’s disorderliness, her exhausting anxiety to please and her non-stop chatter make her a pain to live with. (There’s also a suggestion that she’s never properly got over the death of her and Jim’s second child, a daughter, who lived only a few hours.) What saves the film, and makes it exciting, is that Yvonne Mitchell’s characterisation is rich enough to fuse these different factors persuasively: she gives Amy a social resonance but makes her completely individual too. Amy knows something – everything – is wrong. Mitchell suggests that she’s subconsciously impelled to keep moving and talking but she can’t control what she says or does and, as a result, she makes matters worse. The maddening music on the radio – which gets on the nerves of anyone watching Woman in a Dressing Gown, as it gets on Jim’s and Brian’s – is a highly effective expression of her state of mind.
Mitchell and Thompson work things up to such a pitch that, by the time Jim tells his wife he wants to leave her for Georgie and Amy tries desperately to save the marriage, she seems to be going insane. In terms of plotting, the sequences in streets and local shops at this point in the film may be contrived – but they work because, by now, the whole story seems to be happening in Amy’s head as much as in the world outside it. (I may have imagined this but it seemed that, once the marriage was disintegrating, the clutter in the Prestons’ flat reduced to reveal vacant space.) The abbreviated timeframe of the story – it appears to take place over a very few days – and the sudden shifts in the closing stages perhaps expose the one-set origins of the piece. (I assume the television play was broadcast live.) But the hugely qualified happy ending is powerful. Jim decides to stay with Amy. Normal domestic service is resumed.
11 August 2014