The Romantic Englishwoman

Dir: Joseph Losey

1975

**

I imagine it would have been every actor’s dream to star in a film based on a Thomas Wiseman with a screenplay written by the great Tom Stoppard. I have no doubt at all that this is what convinced both Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson to sign on the dotted line. I’m sure working with Joseph Losey was also an attraction, although his career had been in decline since his Harold Pinter adaptations. The Romantic Englishwoman is at times a stunning film to watch, the only problem being that it is so painfully melodramatic it verges on hysterical. Caine plays Lewis, a successful English novelist whose discontented wife Elizabeth, played by Jackson, decides to take a holiday to Baden-Baden, Germany, in order to "find herself". There she meets a mysterious young man called Thomas (Helmut Berger), who claims to be a poet but whom is revealed to be a petty thief, conman, drug courier and gigolo. Though the two are briefly attracted to each other, she returns home. He, hunted by gangsters for a drug consignment he has lost, follows her back to England. Lewis, highly suspicious of his wife, invites the young man to stay with them and act as his secretary. Initially resenting the presence of the handsome stranger, Elizabeth one night starts an affair and the two run away with no money to the south of France. Lewis follows them, he in turn being followed by the gangsters looking for Thomas (played by a pre-Hugo Drax Michael Lonsdale). At the end the gangsters reclaim Thomas, presumably for execution, while Lewis ‘reclaims’ Elizabeth. The film isn’t without stylish flare but this is easy to overlook when faced with such awkward melodrama. The script leaves a lot to be desired, I believe the intention was for the audience to draw their own conclusions in certain respect but for me it just felt half written. The biggest problem is that, while there is plenty of mystery, there is very little suspence. I visit from a wanted gangster should be uneasy and should put the audience on edge, but it doesn’t. Looking out of a window with a vague look upon your face isn’t really emotional acting at its finest, and the funniest moments of the film, which are all unintentionally funny, are when Caine explodes into furious rant. It’s hard to relate to the non-problems of the 1970s elite and its even less impossible to take it seriously when a would-be gangster, straight out of a poor Raymond Chandler imitation, turns up unannounced acting more like an awkward sperm donor in a doctors waiting room than an edgy criminal. I can’t help but feel sorry for Helmut as he is given a character who couldn’t be more out of place in the film, who has to interact with the might of Caine and Jackson, whose characters seem to live in a totally different world to him. It’s as if two different films were being filmed in the same studio at the same time and one accidentally merged with the other and they carried on filming anyway. I wouldn’t say it’s a car crash film as such, but there is an element of disliking it but finding it hard to look away. Its opulence is, I’m afraid, style over content for most of the film and the only thing that kept me entertained was the nonsensicality of the whole thing and how straight the performances are faced with such overblown silliness. There is also an odd mixed message about conformity, but I’m not sure it had the desired affect or it was intentional in the first place. If I’m totally worng and I, as well as everyone else who has watched it, has overlooked that it is in fact a satire, then bravo, what an amazing achievement, but I very much doubt this is the case. It's a curiosity to consider when looking over the works of Michael Caine, Glenda Jackson, Thomas Wiseman, Tom Stoppard and Joseph Losey, but I would argue that this is all it is, a curiosity. Still, it looks good, and my goodness, the clothes…