This Was a Woman

“I would have enjoyed power,” says Sylvia Russell (Sonia Dresdel), the manipulative matriarch who succeeds in destroying her household in Tim Whelan’s This Was a Woman. Perhaps a warning to a society in which women’s ambitions were restricted, the film combines thoroughly over-the-top melodrama with the subtle, psychologically evil performance of Dresdel (it’s worth noting her role here is strikingly similar to Joan Crawford’s elegantly maniacal matriarchs in both 1950’s Harriet Craig and 1955’s Queen Bee). Sylvia’s victims include her husband Arthur (Walter Fitzgerald), daughter Fenella (Barbara White), son-in-law Val (Scott Forbes), and the man she secretly desires for his stature, Austin Penrose (Cyril Raymond); only her son Terry (Emrys Jones) senses his mother’s worst instincts fairly early on (clues: cruelty to animals, stealing his toxicology textbooks). While the trigger behind Sylvia’s behavior is never explained, the film is still a compelling depiction of the darkness that can lie behind mid-century propriety (Sylvia keeps a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the china cabinet). Spolianksi’s piano score is extremely repetitious as if trying harder and harder to convince us that all is good and beautiful.