Woman of Straw - film review

To my astonishment, I find that almost six years have passed since I reviewed Catherine Arley's suspense novel  Woman of Straw on this blog in its early days. Arley is an interesting French writer, and having enjoyed the book, I've been trying for ages to track down the film version, to no avail. Recently I chanced upon a Spanish DVD version, available on Amazon, with the facility to switch off the Spanish language and hear the original actors' voices. So I grabbed it.

I'm glad I did, because it's a very watchable film, set partly in a very grand English mansion, and partly on a private yacht cruise of the Med. The fact that the stars are Sean Connery and Gina Lollobrigida makes it even more watchable. The film was first screened in 1964, when Connery was already anxious to avoid becoming typecast as James Bond, and he has a quite hypnotic screen presence here.

Ralph Richardson plays Connery's odious uncle. He is racist, sexist and incredibly rich. You are already guessing that he is a prospective victim, aren't you? Well, you are right. He hires a new nurse, the lovely Gina, and soon the nasty old man falls for her. But what about his nephew? His motives seem equivocal, and before long he is encouraging Gina to marry the old man. What's he playing at, and who can be trusted?

At one point, there appears to be a glaring legal error in the script, but this is subsequently explained as representing one of the numerous plot twists. The direction, by Basil Dearden, is extremely competent, even if the characters' motivations aren't explored in any depth. Some commentators suggest that Hitchcock would have shown more flair, given the melodramatic potential of the story. However, the evidence of Marnie, first screened in the same year, and also starring Connery, suggests otherwise. Personally, I enjoyed the film, and felt my long search for it was worth while. The book is superior, but both are entertaining, and a little bit different.

Forgotten Book - Dead Man's Bay

Some time back, I featured in Patti Abbott's series of Forgotten Books a novel by Catherine Arley called Woman of Straw, which was filmed with Sean Connery (although I continue to hunt in vain for a showing of the movie on the schedules). That is my favourite of the two Arley books I've read so far, but Dead Man's Bay also proved worth reading.

Arley was a French writer, several of whose thrillers were published in translation by Collins Crime Club in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She was an exponent of psychological suspense with startling plot twists in the same school as Boileau and Narcejac, Japrisot and Montheilet, although her reputation has not lasted as well.

Dead Man's Bay starts off as a routine woman-in-jeopardy novel, but eventually develops into something more sinister; the ending is very dark indeed. The set-up is straightforward: Ada is alone in a house on a remote Breton clifftop and has evidently suffered a mental collapse. She seems emotionally dependent on her rich husband Andre, but he is away on business and a sequence of troubling, though at first trivial, events causes Ada to fear for her sanity.

The flaw - to my mind - in the novel is that one needs to root for Ada, but in truth she is such a misery that one’s sympathy for her predicament soon becomes tested up to, and beyond, the limits of tolerance. Yet I found the book interesting enough to want to seek out more of her work, and discover whether she was able elsewhere to marry her undoubted talent for tension-building with more adept characterisation. In Woman of Straw, she did just that.