England’s Women in Film

While Ida Lupino was the lone woman filmmaker working in Hollywood during the 1950s, at least three women were active within the industry during the same period in Great Britain. Muriel Box (born Violet Baker in 1905) worked her way into filmmaking through the ranks as a typist, “continuity girl,” and finally screenwriter. After a great deal of success writing scripts for other directors, she finally directed The Happy Family in 1952, from a script co-authored with her husband, producer Sydney Box, based on a play by Michael Clayton Hutton. Released under the title Mr. Lord Says No in the United States, The Happy Family is a quietly amusing comedy that derives its humor from the class conflicts inherent in British society. Street Corner (1953) is one of Box’s best efforts, a sort of forerunner of Kathryn Bigelow’s police melodrama Blue Steel (1990); Box’s version is a narrative about the lives of women in the police force, made as a response to Basil Dearden’s The Blue Lamp (1950), a popular British policier that completely ignored the contributions of women police officers.

A Passionate Stranger (1957) is an innovative comedy filmed in a mixture of color and black-and-white, while The Truth About Women (1957) is told in flashback, as Box presents the relationships between the sexes in a remarkably sophisticated light, atypical for its time period. Too Young to Love (1960), her most controversial film, an adaptation of Elsa Shelley’s play Pick-Up Girl, deals frankly with pregnancy, societal views toward women, venereal disease, prostitution, and abortion. Box was thus able to infuse political statements into films that were billed as simple entertainment.

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