The Wicked Lady (1945)

Hello again! Ready for the first installment of James Mason movie info?

The above poster is for the 1945 release The Wicked Lady. My reasons for watching this first in the series of James Mason movies I've seen over the past few weeks were twofold-- one, it was available on Youtube in its entirety and two, I thought it was The Man in Grey. Not because it was labelled The Man in Grey, or I even favored one movie over the other, but because the clip from a Parkinson interview that preceded some discussion of Mason's forties' English filmwork had a particularly racy clip of James Mason in 18th century garb shouting down an equally distraught Margaret Lockwood. Hook it uuuuup, says I, thinking that might be a bit of histrionic viewing fun for the afternoon. Little did I know, these two pictures were easy to confuse to the casual observer-- Gainsborough films actually made several movies with a combination of Margaret Lockwood, Mason, Stewart Granger, and Phyllis Calvert in a short time period in the 1940's. I would probably say this is the best of those, but only because it is also the most COMPLETELY OFF THE RAILS costume drama/thriller you have ever seen. 

Let us discuss. Spoilers all over the place, btw, so if you haven't seen it, there's an excellent Criterion print of the movie, or this slightly fuzzy Youtube copy which will do in a pinch.

The completely GORGEOUS Margaret Lockwood

The movie opens with two relatively marginal characters, the enfiancéd Caroline (Patricia Roc) and Sir Ralph Skelton (Griffith Jones), discussing their forthcoming nuptials on horseback before a very unconvincing back-projection of the English countryside. The bride-to-be makes the fatal error of inviting her childhood friend Barbara (Margaret Lockwood) to come down to Sir Ralph's estate in preparation for her role as maid of honor. From the moment Barbara arrives, things seem to bend to her will-- she schemes to take Ralph away from Caroline and does. Looking like young Joan Bennett, dark haired Lockwood frowns and flounces and flirts her way through the first thirty minutes, bored with life in rural England, until she loses an heirloom brooch in a card game with friends. As rumors of an infamous, masked highwayman robbing coaches have been circulating through the village for some time, Barbara makes use of a secret door in her bedroom to sneak out to the main road in disguise, impersonating the highwayman in mask and plumed hat to steal back the jewelry she lost in the card game. Her ruse is a such a roaring success and handy diversion from her domestic ennuis that she decides to try it again ...whereupon the real highwayman shows up. 

Enter Captain Jerry Jackson (our James Mason). And here's where the plot really takes off. Helllllloooo, handsome.

Not being into that whole Harlequin romance school of the dude in white stockings and velvet breeches, I wasn't sure how it was going to go with this whole "highwayman" thing, but...let me tell you, James Mason is working it. Not the costume or the long hair so much as a breathlessly wicked series of exchanges with Margaret Lockwood. They're bad in that they're lightly tossed innuendos-- but then they're amazing in that they're lightly tossed innuendos. I didn't expect this kind of frank sex banter from a wartime English release, let me tell YOU.

Examples:

Barbara: Do you always take women by the throat?
Jerry: No, usually I just take 'em. 

Jerry: I know an inn near here...will you do me the favor of supping with me?
Barbara: What have I got to lose?
Jerry: That is a matter for conjecture. 

Jerry: I can teach you better ways of avoiding boredom than trotting the highways.
Barbara: Not so fast, Captain Jackson, I've not deceived my husband yet.
Jerry: Then it's time you began. The careless fool deserves all he gets!!
Barbara: Wait a minute, what about the jewels and the money?
Jerry: Keep 'em. I can be generous if you can.
Barbara: I like to drive a hard bargain....
Jerry: [profound pause] So do I....

See the isolated scene below here.

Go get 'em, Jerry....

And while there's a tasteful cutaway, there is no ambiguity in the fact that Jerry and Barbara...yep, married Barbara...are whiling away some carnal hours at aforementioned inn, known criminal and lady of the manor in flagrante. Do you understand in the same year, David Lean's beautiful but emotionally exasperating Brief Encounter was another runaway success in England? I think of that movie as the embodiment of war/just postwar era English romance, and it couldn't be more buttoned and tweeded and chaste if it tried. Then apparently also this kind of you-couldn't-get-away-with-this-under-the-American-Hayes-code devilment going on! Color me shocked. Yet the only change the Hayes office demanded when bringing the movie stateside was that several scenes be reshot because the period-correct bodices of the women's dresses were deemed too low for American film standards. Me: DID YOU HAVE SOUND ON WHEN YOU WATCHED THIS MOVIE? I found myself way less distracted by the cleavage than by the fact that people were offscreen hooking up left and right. You can't account for some people.  

Ok, fine, the cleavage was a little distracting, but compared to entire racy subplots, far less so.

Jerry and Barbara continue their illicit affair while robbing people and trading barbs, though Barbara as pupil serves to surpass her teacher in viciousness, greed, and lack of empathy. When a robbery goes off kilter and a guard (who happens to be one of her husband's tenants, long story) pursues the pair, Jerry encourages Barbara to shoot the horse, having earlier explained that it's easier to gain an acquittal for robbery and a horse's demise versus robbery and murder... Barbara of course shoots the guy, who subsequently dies in the road. Jerry clucks at her and they part ways, he back to the inn and she back to her husband's estate. The next day, Hogarth, who's some kind of super religious, super old family servant, finds Barbara's handkerchief near where the body is found-- he confronts Barbara, who dissolves into a flood of crocodile tears and swears her compliance in the criminal goings on were only under duress. She swears she'll do penance and rededicate her life to the Lord....which for some reason this man falls for hook, line, and sinker. Her first article of business AFTER convincing Hogarth not to rat her out is to begin poisoning said Hogarth. Because she's a thief, adultress, murderer, and POISONER. Ugh, again, I was fairly spinning in my seat with anticipation of what Barbara would do next.

Nice hat, bro. Watch that flintlock.

There's a subplot where Barbara keeps meeting a nobleman she's actually in love with (Michael Rennie), and a considerable amount of sturm and drang over poor thrown o'er Caroline which I cannot confess any particular interest in-- the real draws in this movie are Barbara's badness and Captain Jerry's relationship with bad Barbara. What would the titular Wicked Lady do next! Of course, as is often the case in time of trial between accomplices, she proceeds to T old Captain Jerry under the B.

Barbara, after dispatching poor Hogarth off to his much discussed heaven, goes to see Jerry at the inn. Ohhh, misssstttaaake. In the interim between robbings, as they've been cooling their heels after the murder in the last one, Jerry has taken back up with his old girlfriend, and is found in bed with her by an extremely un-understanding Barbara. Me at this point: WHAT! THEY CAN'T! WHAT! While Mason is never shown and definitely his girlfriend is never shown, you can tell by Barbara's face and their voices off screen exactly what the frank is going on.

Jerry: Barbara! Where you been all these months, I've missed you! I never thought you'd come tonight.
Barbara: OBviously.
Jerry: Oh, her, she's, ahem, she's nothing to me, she's just a wench I brought to pass the time until you came back.
Barbara: You look very well together. I warned you if ever deceived me you'd be sorry. You'll find this wench cheap though she looks will cost you dear!

Yep. Pretty much. Yep.

Barbara then anonymously tips off her husband that the highwayman he's looking for (Jerry) is in the inn and pretty much primed to be arrested. Jerry is arrested and taken to the hanging grounds, where he is the old school Steven Tyler of the to-be-executed...exuberantly greeting the  huge crowd gathered by name ("Hello! Hey! Hi, Norma! Goodbye!") and throwing off his jabot and waist coat and all his nice things like, "Here, anybody need a necktie? Necktie?" The "gibbet at Tyburn" is the setting. Barbara goes to the hanging, and is in earshot as Jerry makes his last speech:

My friends. My friends. I don't care whether you're for me or ag'in me, all that matters is you've come here in your thousands to give me a grand send off. To the lovely ladies I say don't waste your love, your caresses, your tears, on villains like me. Save em for someone who's worth it, a faithful honest man...if you can find one!! [laughter] To the men I say...never put your faith in a woman, for however much you think she loves you, she'll like as not betray you in the end...in my short, and merry life, I've loved 'em all...but I've only once made the fatal mistake of trusting one of them and that's why I'm here now...but believe me....only a woman's hand would have put a halter around the neck of Lucky Jerry Jackson....May God bless all my friends....and may my enemies be hanged, as I am.

And they hang the S.O.B. But wait! He's left a letter for Barbara to read!!! I LOVE THIS MOVIE! The contents are read by voice-overed Mason as Lockwood holds the last minute missive in hand:

So, my bold, bad Barbara, you're afraid of me at last. You needn't be, we had some good sport together, and Jerry Jackson's not the one to whine now the reckoning has to be paid. You'll have to pay yours too, never fear. In the meantime if you feel you owe me some kindness, give a share of our earnings to the girl beside my coffin. She was with me that night at the inn. She was my doxy before I ever met you and she's stood by me ever since. Farewell then, my lovely Barbara, til our next new meeting....

Words added to my vocabulary by this movie that I will never have occasion to use: gibbet, doxy. And you think that's it, but in the ensuing fracas after the hanging, Jerry was cut down by his friends! HE MIGHT NOT BE DEAD! And he sure ain't dead when he shows up all Phantom of the Opera in Barbara's bedroom. Here's perhaps the most "Whoa, what....what!" part of the whole movie. Also, I want every movie here forward to have as many twists and bad turns as this one, it's really entertainment at its best. Just as Barbara is trying to hook up with the Michael Rennie character that she still has a crush on after all this time, Jerry shows up.

"Soooo...I'm back from the dead, in case you were wondering..."

There's some discussion of what it's like to be hanged and some light choking (yeah, sure, why not) before we get to this exchange. Which is so crazy I don't even know what to do with it.

Barbara: And now that you've found me? 

Jerry: We've got to pick up our life together just where we left off.

Barbara: What do you mean?  

Jerry: I meant to kill you at first, then I began to remember those crisp, clear nights when we rode together...the thrill of the hours that followed when you put aside your trappings of the road and lay in my arms....warm, yielding, lovely...I knew then that it wasn't vengeance that I wanted...it was you!

Barbara: No! NO!

Jerry: Have I suddenly become so distasteful?

Barbara:  Things are different now, I'm in love, deeply sincerely in love

Jerry: So my caresses would be repulsive?

Barbara:  I told you, I'm in love!

Jerry: [laughing] Twould be a new experience, to take you against your will...

Barbara:  You wouldn't!

Jerry: You underrate me.

Barbara: I'll call for help!

Jerry: And give yourself away? No, Barbara, you're as much in my power as if we were on a desert island. [gathers her up into his arms to carry her]

Barbara: No! No! Please, please!

Jerry: This must be what they mean when they say revenge is sweet!

ARE YOU SERIOUS RIGHT NOW. That shrieking cat emoticon is pretty much the sum total of my feelings at the moment. No means no, Captain Jerry, good God! Do you understand in 1945 you could hardly show people kissing onscreen in America for longer than two seconds, and here Jerry's about to seriously "have his way" with Barbara sans consequence. The difference being, I suppose, that all this is implied rather than shown. I still think if you were making this movie in America at the same time, the production code wouldn't have let them get away with a full half of the movie. See also that scene in Gone with the Wind, where drunk Rhett Butler picks up an unwilling Scarlett O'Hara and says "This is one night you're not turning me out" before carrying her upstairs...but at least they were married? I don't know, I am still scandalized.

I wasn't able to get a good screen shot of this scene, but it's mesmerizing.

I've taken you through the larger part of the movie already, but not to worry, the last ten minutes are just as hell-for-leather as the first 90, and I won't give them away. My only criticism of the film as a whole is that the movie doesn't fully commit to being "The Wicked Lady AND JERRY" because all the scenes with Caroline and Michael Rennie and Sir Ralph come off as essentially waiting periods in between seeing Barbara and Jerry together again.

James Mason credits this film, in conjunction with the other Gainsborough movies from the same time period, with a surge in his popularity as a star in England...while he himself seems to downplay the quality of the writing (Shakespeare it ain't), I think he really shines, adding a rakish energy and credibility to lines that could have easily seemed banal coming from another actor.

"Ok, now one smiling...ok now one brooding..."---> acting range

Promotional spots from Life magazine touting the film's American release, December 1945. I love that they call James Mason "the man of mood and menace"! You can't get enough alliteration in these old advertisements.

Have you seen The Wicked Lady? If you have, which section struck you as the most "wicked" or outrageous (correct answer: all of them)? What are your thoughts on Gainsborough melodramas? If you're a James Mason fan, can you remember the first movie you took notice of him in?

That's all for today, but I'll be back with more James Mason material tout de suite. Talk to you soon! Til then.