Leslie Arliss

The Wicked Lady

The Wicked Lady

Margaret Lockwood devours the screen as a tightly wound seventeenth-century beauty with loose morals, who steals her best friend’s wealthy fiancé on the eve of their wedding. And that’s only the beginning of this piece of pulp from director Leslie Arliss—there are no depths to which this sinful woman won’t sink. James Mason costars, and nearly steals the movie, as a highwayman with whom our antiheroine becomes entangled. This nasty, subversive treat was the most commercially successful of all the Gainsborough melodramas.

Film Info

  • United Kingdom
  • 1945
  • 104 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.33:1
  • English

Available In

Collector's Set

Eclipse Series 36: Three Wicked Melodramas from Gainsborough Pictures

Eclipse Series 36: Gainsborough Melodramas

DVD Box Set

3 Discs

$35.96

The Wicked Lady
Cast
Margaret Lockwood
Barbara Worth
James Mason
Captain Jerry Jackson
Patricia Roc
Caroline
Griffith Jones
Sir Ralph Skelton
Michael Rennie
Kit Locksby
Felix Aylmer
Hogarth
Enid Stamp Taylor
Lady Henrietta Kingsclere
Jean Kent
Jackson’s doxy
Credits
Director
Leslie Arliss
Producer
R. J. Minney
From the novel The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton by
Magdalen King-Hall
Screenplay
Leslie Arliss
Additional dialogue by
Gordon Glennon
Additional dialogue by
Aimée Stuart
Cinematography
Jack Cox
Editor
Terence Fisher
Art director
John Bryan
Musical direction
Louis Levy

Current

Eclipse Series 36: Three Wicked Melodramas from Gainsborough Pictures
Eclipse Series 36: Three Wicked Melodramas from Gainsborough Pictures

British wartime audiences ate up these rule-breaking costume pictures—entertainments for a populace seeking escapism.

By Michael Koresky