Director: J. Lee Thompson
Running Time: 89 mins
Certificate: PG
Release Date: August 13th 2012
Although not as famous as the likes of The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner and Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, many credit Woman In A Dressing Gown as the place where the British Kitchen Sink Drama began. It was exceedingly unusual on its 1957 release for taking the small, personal crisis of a normal family living in a block of flats as its main subject, setting a precedent for a lot of the gritty, working class life movies of the 1960s.
Yvonne Mitchell plays Amy Preston, a housewife who seems happy (at least on the surface) in her life as mother of Brian (Andrew Ray) and wife of Jim (Anthony Quayle), even if the dinner is rarely on the table on time and the flat is normally a bit of a mess. Jim is less happy though, straining against his less-than-perfect domesticity and a wife he feels has changed since they married. He’s started seeing a young woman from his office, Georgie (Sylvia Syms), who is utterly devoted to him and wishes for him to leave Amy. Although Jim says he doesn’t want to hurt his wife, he eventually decides he must tell Amy he’s stepping out with another woman and wants a divorce. [Read more…]
