Very disappointing...

Best movie of this year hands down!

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

This is Yvonne Mitchell's film, of course, and definitely her best performance. Anthony Quayle is as always one of the most reliable actors there ever was, and here for a change he is to play an extremely ordinary part: this could happen to anyone, and it usually happens sooner or later to everyone. The situation couldn't be more common. Sylvia Syms is beautiful as usual and doesn't have to act much, it's enough for her just to be seen, and she actually plays no great part - she is just the other woman. The acting is all Yvonne Mitchell's.Of course you have to worry about her, as her heart is torn apart, as her world is turned to shambles, as she desperately tries to find a way out and fails in every single effort, and how she stills goes on just to carry on. She is the most helpless of all, and yet she is the one who carries through and gets through the crisis in a wreck of only shambles, as if you needed to get your whole world totally ruined just to find it all perfectly normal, as if nothing had happened, as if it just had to pass by like an ordinary shower of rain...The direction is superb throughout with all its diverting manoeuvres focussing on petty dertails for a relief, like a missing button, the baby next door (apparently Mitchell's own), the soap problem with the engagement ring, and above all the shabby old drsssing gown - the very symbol of the film, nothing much, just an ordinary old worn out dressing gown, which you never really get out of...

In the late sixties (Pre-VCR) we had three UHF stations in our area, and they all signed off at 12 midnight. Unfortunately I worked second shift at a local factory and was just getting out at that time. One of our stations, bowing to public pressure, agreed to remain on after midnight and show movies. "Great...Right? "No, Not so great!!! They purchased four films, one of which was "Woman In A Dressing Gown", and showed them over and over again. "My God, It was just like "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" I still have the dialogue running through my head even today. (He covers everything I make in sauce...Dollops of sauce) The remaining films were(in order of boredom):The Burning Hills, Teenagers From Outer Space,and Dangerous Youth

To me this movie must be the first of the "kitchen sink" dramas of post war Britain as it came out in the fifties,long before the sixties made the genre popular. Woman in a Dressing Gown has been described by film historian Jeffrey Richards as "a Brief Encounter of the council flats", taking the scenario of a extra-marital affair and relocating to a less middle-class setting. However, writer Ted Willis described it more simply, as a film about " good honest fumbling people, caught up in tiny tragedies". As its female-focused title suggests, the film spends a lot of time on Amy, the wife whose devastated when her husband asks for a divorce. She gives it the works as the drudge who fights to rekindle the affection of her husband. There's a great bit when her new hairdo gets ruined by the rain, but it's heavy weather throughout. Amy is anything but the model '50s housewife: she burns food, never finishes the housework, always has the radio on too loud, and rarely has time to get dressed properly. But the film allows us to see reasons why she might have become that way (grief,loneliness,boredom) rather than simply demonising her. Do not watch this film if your at a low and feeling depressed as it will definitely not help. Yvonne Mitchells bravura performance won her the Berlin Film Festival's Silver Bear award for best actress

I have seen this film exactly once, when I was about 15, on television about 35 years ago. It's unforgettable for its searing depiction of the life of postwar Britons of the middle class.Jim Preston (Quayle) is married to a woman who appears nearly helpless as a housekeeper and could be suffering from chronic depression after the death of a child. The cramped flat where they live is a suffocating mess, cabinets spilling debris, sinks filled with dishes, dustbins crammed, through which his bathrobe-clad wife drifts in a logorrheic, ash-dropping haze. By contrast, the young woman he is infatuated with is elegant and pristine, and their encounters are marked by a tranquility and privacy lacking in his domestic life.He makes one attempt to break free, causing his wife to decompensate into a hysterically sobbing invalid. His teenage son is fiercely protective of his mother and furiously rejects Preston. His life begins to come apart, and the freedom and love he yearns for slip away. He sinks back into his life, resurrecting his wife, and all goes on exactly as before--only worse.It was utterly unlike anything I had seen before, completely real, unflinching, passionate and hurtful. The B/W cinematography is done with a dingy look that captures the sooty city perfectly.This movie should come out on VHS, at least.