Three Wicked Melodramas from Gainsborough Pictures

While the rest of the film industry was cranking out patriotic paeans to sacrifice and endurance during World War II, Gainsborough Pictures in Britain had a blockbuster hit with the potboiler costume drama The Man in Grey (1943)—a success that spawned similar melodramas about plucky heroines, wicked villainesses, and darkly seductive antiheroes, all defined by superficial elegance on a budget and gleeful plunges into bad behavior. This Eclipse line set compiles three of the most famous, including The Man in Grey, which was directed by Leslie Arliss and adapted from a novel by Eleanor Smith. Margaret Lockwood stars as Hesther Shaw, a calculating social-climber who betrays her best friend, Clarissa (Phyllis Calvert). The film made stars of James Mason, as callous Lord Rohan, who marries sweet, sunny Clarissa simply to secure an heir, and Stewart Granger, who plays Peter, a handsome actor who woos Clarissa. Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945), helmed by Arthur Crabtree and based on a novel by Margery Lawrence, is a lurid tale of repressed memories and flamboyant gypsy criminals, with Calvert playing Maddalena, a married Italian woman with a split personality, stemming from an earlier trauma, and Granger as Nino, a petty thief who is her lover when she's her “other” self. The Wicked Lady (1945) reunited Lockwood and Mason with director Arliss in the studio's most successful film, based on a novel by Magdalen King-Hall. Lockwood plays Barbara Worth, a bored rich woman who turns to robbery for fun and profit, and Mason is Capt. Jerry Jackson, her secret lover and partner in crime. Filled with silly twists and overwrought emotion, these films are not the least bit credible, but all are disreputable good fun. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)