Where Was Woman in a Dressing Gown Filmed

Woman in a Dressing Gown

A married, middle-aged woman is shocked to discover that her husband, who she thought was content in their marriage, has become infatuated with a beautiful younger woman and is planning to leave his family for her.

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"There are certain films of that period (the 1950s British New Wave/Kitchen Sink era) that have gained enormous fame, the obvious one is Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. It was a wonderful film, full of brilliant performances, but it's about a man, and men have always been more important than women. Yvonne Mitchell did not go on to become a big international star as Albert Finney did, but Woman in a Dressing Gown precedes it by some time."

~ Sylvia Syms, star of Woman in a Dressing Gown

Despite winning a Golden Globe and four awards at the Berlin International Film Festival, with the aforementioned Mitchell taking the Silver Bear for Best Actress, J. Lee Thompson's 1957 proto-kitchen sink drama…
Proto-kitchen sink drama (water basin drama?) featuring Yvonne Mitchell in one of the strongest, most overlooked performances of the era. Saddled with the impossible task of making viewers believe anyone would choose a scatty, disheveled housewife over Sylvia Syms, Mitchell rolls up her sleeves, spits on her palms, and takes a bloody good charge at it!

Kitchen Sink Ranked
'Didn't you have the strength to leave him alone?' (Yvonne Mitchell as Amy Preston)

There's not a smidgen of kitsch in J. Lee Thompson's pioneering kitchen sink drama; it's just a sensitively written, thoughtfully directed and powerfully acted gem from the dawn of the British New Wave with the electrifying, Silver Bear Best Actress-winning Mitchell as the Angry Middle-Aged Woman to counter all those Angry Young Men like Laurence Harvey, Albert Finney and Richard Harris who were setting the screen alight with their own incendiary performances.

The action takes place in a dingy flat on a very austere looking London council estate where Mitchell lives with hubby Anthony Quayle and son Andrew Ray. Their abode is shabby and messy as…
I seem to remember seeing this about twenty years ago, before it was particularly well-known or widely available (it's now on DVD).

It was the first time I saw Yvonne Mitchell in a film, and the fact she still remains fairly unknown (she died in 1979, after making just 19 films and two key TV appearances as Cathy in 'Wuthering Heights' and as Julia in the excellent Kneale-Cartier production of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four') is sad considering her clear talent and demonstrable range.

Mitchell plays Amy, a wife who has become stuck in a rut, doing poor cooking and chaotic housework in her dressing gown, living day to day in a twenty-year marriage with forced cheerfulness; Anthony Quayle is her husband Jim,…
amy is a fascinating character. she is always doing something outwardly; cooking, putting on the tea, pouring drinks, fumbling with the radio (the music has to be on always.) all so nervously, never finishing anything she started. "everything will be alright, you'll see," she keeps saying—like beckett's winnie when she says "oh, this is gonna be another happy day." those words are almost believable to them.

in the beginning, you look at amy; her gaunt face, her messy hair, her shabby dressing gown, and you can see her whole past in front of you. she was pretty once, as she keeps reminding us. you begin to imagine all sorts of things she went through that make her as she is.…
Of all the inanities that Godard has ever uttered his attack on Woman in a Dressing Gown must be the crowning glory of his stupidity. Three years before he "set the cinematic world alight" with his handheld energetic debut he laid in to this superb social realist effort from J. Lee Thompson, criticising its manic energy derived from performance AND camera movement. So without ever apologising or backtracking this "great innovator" essentially copied J. Lee Thompson, a man who would go on to direct a dozen Charles Bronson revenge pictures.

As Frears said about Truffaut, bollocks to Godard.

Thompson's kitchen sink portrait of an exhausted housewife oblivious that her scattershot approach towards life is driving her husband in to the…
Tightly directed and impeccably acted, particularly by Yvonne Mitchell, whose palpable distress is telegraphed in every small gesture and calls forth tremendous empathy in the viewer. Ambient sounds (clocks ticking; church bells ringing) and visual details (the view into Georgie's rooms from outside and what we must look past to see in; the mad disarray of Amy and Jim's apartment) -- all create a vivid, very real place in which these characters live. Excellent Kitchen Sink drama.
Yvonne Mitchell is the standout in this excruciatingly sad marital drama, playing a forerunner to Cassavetes' and Mike Leigh's bipolar heroines. Director J. Lee Thompson manages to make the cramped, disorganized central setting far more interesting than most chamber-play-to-film adaptations, (it's worth noting Thompson would reunite Sylvia Syms and Anthony Quayle in the wide open North African desert vistas of Ice Cold In Alex a year later.)

While still a film critic, Godard slammed Woman in a Dressing Gown (and British film in general), writing that Thompson's camerawork was "lunatic," which is pretty rich coming from Godard. I think it's a film of deliberate, exciting choices, not always pleasant, but worthy of serious reevaluation.
If only she weren't so helpless, if only she were a bitch, it'd all be so easy.

&

Perhaps she's what she is because I'm what I am.

Yvonne Mitchell is just heartbreaking in this, projecting such a fully-formed, sympathetic character. Anthony Quayle's strained smiles on his big moon-face. Sylvia Syms, perfectly put together and not at all the bitch a lesser film would cast her as.
Despite being a huge fan of British New Wave cinema - kitchen-noir - I was unaware of this film until recently. What a discovery! I can't help feeling that if this film had been made in French it would be regarded as a classic.

Yvonne Mitchell is quite remarkable - at first the scattiness of her character seems somewhat overplayed, but she grows in emotional depth with every scene. It is fascinating to watch Anthony Quayle as the husband - is this the only 'romantic lead' that this consummate character actor, mostly cast as stern military types, ever played? Not that there is anything romantic about his scrupulously naturalistic performance - with his smooth features and crinkly hair he looks like a prematurely-aged young Richard Attenborough.

It is all held together by superb monochrome photography by the great Gilbert Taylor.
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

"no one is to blame" said the man who was to blame.
A better film description would be man gets tired of old slave and tries to get a new one.