Ordinary Ladies

 It gives me great pleasure to announce a brand new series of films at the Victoria Park Baptist Church, beginning on Thursday, the 9th of June.

Ordinary Ladies

In 1989, Lindsay Crouse appeared in an episode of Columbo in which she plays a psychologist who murders her business partner/boyfriend after she discovers that he has been cheating on her.

Being a well-respected sex therapist, she devises what she thinks will be the perfect murder. She arranges to meet her partner at a very public but slightly sleazy bar, and dresses up as a high-end call girl. He thinks that they are playing a wonderful new sex game, but of course she is performing for potential witnesses, who will testify that he hired the services of a prostitute who obviously killed him when things went sour.

Meanwhile, she sets herself up with an alibi by appearing at a high-profile fund raiser before ducking into the bathroom and changing into her "call girl" persona. Thus bedecked, she walks right past her friends and co-workers who take notice of this very exotic and desirable woman, but completely fail to see that it is her.

Later, Lieutenant Columbo hears from a witness who saw her returning and followed her to the ladies' room, hoping to pick up this very desirable and enticing beauty. Of course the "beauty" never comes out of the ladies' room, and he waits there in vain; even when Lindsay Crouse (back in her own clothes) walks right past him.

"So no one came out of the bathroom?" asks Columbo.

"Ladies went in and ladies came out," he replies.

Columbo is sceptical.

"Just ordinary ladies?" 

"Ordinary ladies!"

***

Our new film series is going to be a celebration of "Ordinary Ladies". These are not super-heroines; they are not vamps or femmes-fatale - they are, in Columbo's words, the ordinary ladies who are usually on the sidelines of most film plots. 

Cinema is filled with ordinary men who are thrust by circumstances into extraordinary situations (think of Cary Grant in North by Northwest) but far fewer films tell stories like this with women.

Which brings us, of course, to the first film in our series.

The Reckless Moment was released in 1949 and tells the story of a completely ordinary housewife (Joan Bennett) who finds her day-to-day life coming apart at the seams when her teenaged daughter's dead-beat boyfriend is apparently murdered. James Mason (in one of his first Hollywood roles) approaches her, thinking she will be an easy mark for blackmail, only to find that she is not remotely what he thought she would be.

Directed by Max Ophüls, The Reckless Moment is a Hollywood film like no other. Joan Bennet's housewife is neither naïve nor super-human; she is exactly what she appears to be, and therein lies her strength. James Mason may be a hardened gambler and criminal but he has never tried to deal with anyone like her and, bluntly, doesn't stand a chance. 

We will be screening The Reckless Moment at 7.30pm on Thursday the 9th of June at the Victoria Park Baptist Church. I hope to see you there!