The Romantic Englishwoman
November. 26,1975 RWhat is real and what is fiction? Faced with writer's block with his novel, Lewis Fielding turns to a film script about a woman finding herself after his wife Elizabeth returns from Baden Baden. She didn't quite find herself there but had a brief encounter in a lift with a German who says he is a poet. Now the German is in England, gets himself invited to tea where he claims he admires Fielding's books. Which one does he like the best? "Tom Jones." Amused at being confused with the other Fielding, the novelist works the German into the plot.
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Reviews
Highly Overrated But Still Good
The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;
Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.
In the extremely strange and uninteresting The Romantic Englishwoman, a husband's suspicion of his wife's infidelity practically pushes her into doing it. The outline of the plot could have been turned into a comedy, but Tom Stoppard and Thomas Wiseman's script is a drama. As a result, there's really nothing and nobody in the film to really care about.Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson are the married couple, and every time she's out of his sight, he imagines that she's with another man—even though when they are together they can't keep their hands off each other and only get in small squabbles instead of real fights. Then, Helmut Berger appears, and even though he's a virtual stranger to Glenda, Michael can't help but practically push them together so that he can prove himself right. It's extremely silly, but not in a comical way. Unless you're a die-hard fan of Glenda Jackson and want to see her whip her clothes off in several scenes, I can't imagine anyone wanting to sit through this movie. The acting feels uninspired, the plot is beyond frustrating, and the characters are impossible to root for. Plus, Glenda Jackson always seems too angry to be likable.
Elizabeth Fielding (Glenda Jackson) returns from spa town Baden Baden, Germany where she met gigolo conman Thomas (Helmut Berger). Her husband Lewis (Michael Caine) is having writer's block and imagines all manners of things his wife is doing. Catherine is the hot nanny. Isabel (Kate Nelligan) is Elizabeth's gossiping friend who Lewis hates. Swan (Michael Lonsdale) is tracking Thomas. Then Thomas shows up at the Fielding home.The couple never intrigued me. They have limited chemistry. Part of the problem is that the movie starts with them apart. They never really connect for me. Neither is the affair that compelling. There is a coldness to the movie. Maybe it's the intent to show a relationship in trouble. It does it in an uninteresting way.
My very first contact with Joseph Losey's canon is this film adapted from Thomas Wiseman's eponymous novel, the reason why I selected this one purely because of its cast, namely for Glenda Jackson, the two-times Oscar winner, whose work has eluded me until now, but the film itself turns out to be a very disappointing misfire.Speaking of the cast, Glenda Jackson has her charismatic dignity in almost every scene although regularly shoehorned between Berger's perpetual snug grin and Caine's perpetual sullen stare, and eventually cannot save the film from the mire of a psychological drama swamped with behavioral absurdities and non-consistent narrative. The fierce-looking wife with a bob cut and perfectly trimmed fringes, who is discontent with her middle-class lifestyle (her writer husband has immersed into the writer's block when writing a film script and becomes paranoid about her adultery in her solo trip to Baden-Baden), tries her luck to elope with a self-claimed German poet (whose real identity is only hinted by smuggling small-time drugs and cruising of elderly lonely-hearts), whom she has met before in Baden- Baden, but is there a fling between them in their previous encounter? The film never answer the question, a corny exploit being overused here. Richard Harley's lyrical string score has stolen the thunder since more often than not, I am very much a visual observer than a sonic perfectionist. Also I quite prefer the slowly panning camera in carefully constructing a hunter and prey game in the beginning part in Baden- Baden to the dreadful and ostentatious meandering in the labyrinth of feigned sentimentality, claiming inane quips like "Englishwoman is the most romantic" (Berger's German accent is a major buzz-killer), I hope someone else could be fortunate enough to fully digest all the hocus-pocus and be grateful towards this ill-fated film adaption.
Is this the worst film ever made (not including Michael Winner's re-make of The Big Sleep which was almost a spoof)? It starts beautifully with Glenda Jackson looking out of a train window over Germany set to lovely music and then it's all downhill from here on in. Glenda Jackson looks stunningly beautiful but Wardrobe obviously had no idea how to dress her in anything that actually suited her, Michael Caine is rubbish as a jealous husband, no subtlety at all & even unsubtle characters require a certain subtlety of acting. He is wholly miscast as an intellectual & a creative type.Occasional flashes of style but the "plot" is muddled & aimless, the script poor, the direction & editing are an utter mess. The whole thing is very 1970s & very difficult to watch without cringing. What an utter waste of time. A hundred minutes of my life that I'll never get back.