The 1963 Burt Bacharach and Hal David song Wives and Lovers melodically captures the mid-20th Century stereotype of a housewife. The ‘little girl’ is warned that to keep her husband’s interest she should take out her curlers before seeing him off in the morning, put on a pretty, city-type dress and slap on some make-up for his return, then dim the lights and pour the wine… The song doesn’t specify that she should keep the home immaculate, but that’s kind of assumed. And watch out, there are girls at the office just lying in wait…
Would this advice have helped the wife in the 1957 film Woman in a Dressing Gown?
A modern mess
The opening scenes of the film (written by Ted Willis and directed by J Lee Thompson) plunge us straight into the chaotic domestic world of the Preston family. Middle-aged couple Jim (Anthony Quayle) and Amy (Yvonne Mitchell) and their late-teenage son Brian (Andrew Ray) live in a modern London council flat. To say it is messy and untidy doesn’t do justice to the almost heroic disorder and lack of comfort. Everything piles up – the washing, the ironing, clothes in need of repair, the dirty dishes, Jim’s dissatisfaction, Amy’s frantic, unfocused activity.
Amy darts nervily around the cramped space, flitting from cooking breakfast to doing the competition in the daily newspaper to turning up the volume on the wireless. No wonder, we might think, that Jim, a shipping clerk, says he has to go to work on a Sunday. No wonder, we might think, that he is really sloping off to spend the day with Georgie (Sylvia Sims), the woman he loves and who is pressing him to leave his wife and build a life with her. And yes, Georgie does work in Jim’s office.
Amy bursts with love for her family. She has a deep capacity for emotion. She quotes poetry and loves music, from Tchaikovsky to a rousing chorus of Oh Oh Antonio at the pub (with Jim when he returns from his Sunday liaison). Brian is a nice young man, a factory worker who takes part in debates at the club and plays jazz records with his new girlfriend. Jim is the one who seems to lack an inner life. He feels stuck. He’s unhappy. He can’t move on, make a change. (He could, of course, in relation to his job at least. Employment was high and there were plenty of opportunities in late 1950s’ UK.) And the implication, from Georgie at least, is that this is Amy’s fault. With the right woman behind him, Jim could make something of himself.
Crisis summit
The crisis comes when Jim succumbs to Georgie and tells Amy he’s leaving. Utterly distraught, she requests a summit meeting of the three of them, and embarks on a series of heart-rending preparations. She pawns her engagement ring to raise some cash, and goes to a hairdresser for a shampoo and set. But it’s raining, and she hasn’t got an umbrella or head-covering, and the do is ruined. She unearths her best dress, but it rips when she tries to get it on. She buys a half-bottle of whisky for Jim, but ends up drinking most of it herself and getting very drunk.
But in her confrontation with Georgie, Amy comes into her own. She manages to take the moral high ground in a firm and non-aggressive way. She speaks from the knowledge of twenty years of marriage. She knows a million things about him to Georgie’s thousand. She says her rival didn’t have the strength to leave him alone. Through the scene, Amy grows in stature and finds her voice. She orders Jim and Georgie to leave, and off they go.
But Jim can’t do it. He comes back, to live a changed life with Amy. She says she doesn’t want his money, she’ll get a job. And, in a gesture which brings to mind the little girl in Wives and Lovers, she’ll get rid of her shabby dressing gown…
We’ve come a long way since 1957, but questions of gender politics and the division of domestic labour still occupy us. And some perceptions of women are so ingrained that we hardly notice they are there. Some of the words commentators have used to describe Amy in the film include frowzy, frumpy, dowdy, slatternly. A bit judgey, eh?
Understanding a hidden dimension
But there’s one major change that has happened in the decades since the film’s release. What we may see as a significant aspect of Jim and Amy’s marriage is almost slipped in to the dialogue. Ted Willis wanted to write about ordinary people fumbling their way through tiny tragedies. So the tragedy of a child who dies in infancy isn’t revealed with great drama.
But when you absorb the momentous nature of this event, you start to relate it to the couple’s present lives. You feel that both Jim and Amy are suffering from feelings they can’t express. Amy’s fierce love for her husband and son acquires another dimension. And you feel there are ways of framing her erratic, hyped-up behaviour which show understanding rather than disapproval.
And Jim, poor Jim, the least likely man ever to have two women fighting over him, how might we view him? Depression is a word which comes to mind. And he knows something is wrong with him. He’s not stupid. He tells Georgie she fell for him because she was ready to fall for someone. He knows they would never last. And she has no real insight into what is troubling him, but puts it down to Amy’s extreme scattiness. Jim may well have rejected offers of counselling or therapy. He may well have scoffed at the idea of talking about grief and loss, or exploring emotional matters with other men.
But as for Amy, she might have done all right. With support, medical and other, she might have come to a calmer place while still maintaining the emotional vibrancy that enhanced her life.
Her cooking though is probably a lost cause. Who cares? Turn the radio up and dance to the music.
