One of my all time favorites.

Must See Movie...

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

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.

Joseph Losey's theme here is borders — the limits that we set in order to transgress them.Borders are arbitrary, disputable. So in the railway car one man says they are in Germany, the other France. Between them is Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson) who has left her family and posh French estate in search of a cure at the waters of Baden Baden. But she limits her escape to wildness to an intemperate bet at roulette. She spots the handsome young gigolo Thomas (Helmut Berger) but responds with bemusement not lust. The latter is what her novelist husband Lewis Fielding (Michael Caine) imagines for her when on the phone she tells him she's going for a lift (aka elevator). As she lives her life she also lives his more lurid — and cliché — fantasy.Dashing young Thomas makes a career of crossing borders. He hijacks a hotel dinner cart to sup outside. His passport declares him "poet" — the wilder version of the husband novelist. Rootless and amoral, he delivers hot cars and cool cocaine to shady men and romantic delusions to wealthy spinsters. "The English women are the worst," he says, "They want everything." That covers Elizabeth: she has the optimum home, cute son, handsome successful loving husband, but she also wants — she knows not what. There is still a fire in her marriage, as we see when she and Lewis make wild love on their lawn, interrupted by their neighbour's headlights (another scene of transgressed borders). The title elides the border between English and Woman. The other border scriptwriter Tom Stoppard plays with here is that between fiction and life. That's his familiar territory. He made his name with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the brilliant modernist comedy that moved between the familiar life of Hamlet's play and the off-stage life centered on his two bit-part friends. Our experience of Elizabeth's life is paralleled by — or filtered through? — her husband's attempt to draw a fiction out of his life. He's writing a screenplay (this one?) about a woman who goes somewhere to find herself. To avoid the cliché he tries to turn that into a thriller.Which is what he does to his wife's life. Lewis likes to set up a life situation to see what will happen. After his phone chat with Elizabeth we see he's having a drink with a scantily clad girl. She's their au pair but Lewis ends his experiment by sending her off to bed. The girl finds herself in another man's plot later when Thomas takes her to a movie, then distracts her from her duties — dangerously — with the pretence to help her English. The girl is fired but Thomas's stay as Lewis's putative secretary continues. The authors survive their characters.Lewis has invited Thomas first to visit, then to stay, as a kind of experiment. He wants to see what will happen between Thomas and Elizabeth, to see if they have indeed cuckolded him as his aberrant fantasy tells him. As a writer he wants to watch what develops. As a husband he tries to exorcise — or exercise — his insecurity. He is determined to catch his wife at infidelity. He pushes them into the date at which Thomas is spotted by his nemesis, forcing his departure, the brief intimacy with Elizabeth that Lewis catches, and the lovers' escape to Italy (over another border) where they play out their — and Lewis's — doomed fantasy. When Thomas calls Lewis to come take her home, Lewis is followed by the shady men whose cocaine Thomas has lost to the rain and he's finished. He has crossed his last border. As a vagabond rapscallion Thomas identifies himself with a Fielding character, Tom Jones. Not his fault it's the wrong Fielding. He read him in translation.The normalcy to which Lewis returns Elizabeth is the sadly escapist party they had planned and — as we did — forgotten. Our glimpse of that festivity is of a desperate, pathetic attempt to kick over the traces — cross the border — of our normal, contained life. That is a hardly promising vision of the life to which the lively wife, reined in, returns. It's yet another scene her novelist husband has arranged for them to "live."

When I first saw this movie in 1992, I always felt it was a lot cleverer, and stronger than many people first thought. After watching it again recently, I still think it has a highly original side to it that still shines through. Caine plays a highly successful writer who becomes obsessed with his wife's (Glenda Jackson) potential infidelity with a handsome German (Helmut Berger) during a recent trip to Baden Baden. Things are more complicated by the fact that Berger suddenly arrives at the Caine household to work as his secretary, and that the movie is full of imaginary scenes that we are led to believe Caine is playing out in his authors' mind. Joe Losey directs in his wonderful trademark style, and although the movie is in danger of being nothing more than an arty, soulless piece, Losey keeps it moving with enough originality to keep the viewer interested - even though it would have benefited from being 20 or 30 minutes shorter. During early scenes, the dialogue is stilted and wooden, but as the movie wears on we realise that Caine and Jackson are actually highly deft at weaving tremendous delivery from the script. Caine's best scene is his rant at his wife's friend Isabel (Kate Nelligan) whilst puffing on a huge cigar, and Jackson shows that the cinema's loss was most certainly the Labour Party's gain. Berger is less convincing, his square jaw good looks not able to support a complex role that probably demanded a better effort, but it's hardly surprising he can't get a foothold in against two acting heavyweights. The Baden Baden backdrop is stunning, and all in all this is a film without doubt one of the most interesting entries in Caine's body of work.

Spa towns seem to have an odd effect on film-makers. Alain Resnais' "Last year in Marienbad", set in the Czech spa town of that name, has a reputation for being bafflingly obscure, so much so that it won itself a place in Michael and Harry Medved's "Fifty Worst Films of All Time". And then there is Joseph Losey's "The Romantic Englishwoman", part of which is set in the German spa town of Baden Baden.The plot concerns Elizabeth, the "romantic Englishwoman" of the title and the wife of a well-known novelist. While staying in Baden Baden Elizabeth has an affair with a young German named Thomas. Or does she? Is it possible that this "affair" was simply a fantasy on her part? Or does it only exist in the mind of her jealous husband Lewis? Thomas, an admirer of Lewis' work, later comes to stay with Lewis and Elizabeth at their home in England, where Lewis makes him surprisingly welcome for a man who is (or whom he believes to be) his wife's lover. There is also a sub-plot about Thomas' criminal associates, led by a man named Swan, who are pursuing him across Europe, but the exact details remain vague.There is an adage that one should never judge a book by its cover, and the cinematic equivalent would probably be "don't judge a film by the big names in its title sequence". Even if you have admired the other work of those names. Michael Caine (now Sir Michael) is one of the cinema's greatest stars, appearing in some of the best British films of the sixties, seventies and eighties such as "Alfie", "Get Carter" and "Educating Rita". Glenda Jackson is today best known as a Labour politician, but was a fine actress in her youth. Scriptwriter Tom Stoppard is perhaps Britain's greatest living playwright. Losey was best known to me as the director of "The Go-Between", one of the major British films of the early seventies and one of the films which started the "heritage cinema" movement.Unfortunately, all this assembled talent does not make for a good film. "The Romantic Englishwoman" goes to show that baffling obscurity was not a monopoly of the Nouvelle Vague and that British art-house film-makers could be just as infuriatingly obscure as their French counterparts. (Losey was American by birth, but I count him as an honorary Briton. He was forced to leave Hollywood during the McCarthy era because of his left-wing sympathies and thereafter worked mostly in Britain). I would not quite count this among my all-time fifty worst films, but it is nevertheless a dull and confusing one which not only lacks a clear storyline but also lacks any perceptible point. There are some films where ambiguity can be a positive virtue rather than a fault, but this is not one of them. 4/10