Autumn 1965

A significant change has taken place in the subject matter of the British cinema. In recent years it has been preoccupied with the difficulties of the young working-class male. In these films women were shadowy figures.

In the last six months, however, two films with quite a different subject have appeared. The first of these was Darling, whose protagonist is a free woman in the sense that Doris Lessing uses the term. That is a woman who wants to make the same kinds of choices that men can make, and enjoy the same kinds of freedom that men possess. The mistake of the heroine in that film was to think that being a free woman was simply to enjoy sexual freedom, which merely extended the range of her activities but gave no freedom at all.

However a second film has just appeared which can truly be said to be for women, and about women, in the sense that it deals with women’s desire to be free, and given both the structure of our society and their own biological and emotional make up, their inability to hold onto that freedom if they get it. This film is Four in the Morning which contains three separate sad stories about women, all cleverly woven into one, so that in fact it could be the story of the same girl at different stages of her life. The stories concern one of a pair of would-be lovers who fail to relate, a young married couple whose marriage has become a trap, and the removal from the Thames and the classification at the morgue of a young unidentified woman aged about twenty-six who has committed suicide.