Margaret Lockwood had appeared in around thirty films by 1943, many
of them 'quota quickies', but the list includes a number of roles for
Michael Powell and
Carol Reed, the lead
role in Alfred Hitchcock's
The Lady
Vanishes (1939) and a role as the idealistic Michael
Redgrave's scheming wife in The
Stars Look Down (1939). From 1965 she had a second career on television
in the popular soap opera, The Flying Swan.
It it was the period from 1943 to 1947, from The
Man in Grey (1943) to Jassy
(1947), which defined her image as the wicked lady of the Gainsborough
melodramas, offering to postwar women an alternative image of womanhood.
Her exchanges with James Mason in The
Wicked Lady (1945) make it unambiguous that her body has a market
value, to be bargained for rather than innocently wooed with romantic
love. Of course, she is punished in the end, but not before she has
established that conquest and desire are not exclusively male pursuits.
The popularity, particularly among women, of the melodramatic extravagance
of the Lockwood character suggests an undercurrent to the restraint
of British realism which recent feminist criticism has begun to recognise.
