The Wicked Lady

Seventeenth-century England. Barbara Skelton marries the wealthy landowner who was engaged to her friend, and is soon bored. One day, to get back a jewel she has lost, she dresses as a man and holds up the road. It works. After that she cannot leave it alone. By night she is a masked highwayman, by day the lady of the manor. On the road she runs into another highwayman, Jerry Jackson, and they become partners. It is one of the Gainsborough studio's costume melodramas and was a great box-office success in post-war Britain. Margaret Lockwood plays Barbara and James Mason the highwayman. Getting it shown in America was not easy: the censors found the women's necklines excessive and some scenes were reshot. Lockwood later said they had to do days of retakes for this and that the whole thing seemed very foolish to her. The source is Magdalen King-Hall's novel.