"The Man in Grey" was the first of the "Gainsborough melodramas", a series of films made by Gainsborough Pictures; they generally had a period setting and a highly dramatic plot. They can be considered as "women's pictures" in that they were primarily aimed at a female audience. (During the war, with so many men serving in the Armed Forces, women made up the greater part of cinema audiences). Unlike many Hollywood "women's pictures" which revolved around a central female character, however, they often featured strong male characters in prominent leading roles.
The main action takes place during the Regency period, although this is set within the framework of a story set in 1943 and involving a romance between the modern descendants of the families featured in the Regency story. The "man in grey" of the title is Lord Rohan, a man notorious both for his debauched lifestyle and for his savage temper. (He has killed several men in duels). He marries Clarissa, a beautiful heiress, but theirs is a loveless marriage from the start. (He marries her partly for her fortune, partly to provide an heir to his family estates). They lead separate lives, and Clarissa falls in love with a handsome young actor named Rokeby. Rohan begins an affair with a scheming young woman named Hesther, who was a former school friend of Clarissa and an actress in the same troupe as Rokeby.
Some have drawn parallels between the four main characters in this drama with Ashley, Melanie, Scarlett and Rhett in "Gone with the Wind", who like Rokeby, Clarissa, Hesther and Rohan can be divided into "two good and two bad". It seemed to me, in fact, that the main influence on Eleanor Smith, the author of the novel on which the film is based, was Thackeray's "Vanity Fair". Apart from the Regency setting there are parallels between Hesther and Thackeray's Becky Sharp and between Clarissa and Becky's friend Amelia. One similarity with "Gone with the Wind" is that the "bad" characters are more memorable than the "good". We remember "Gone with the Wind" for Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable rather than Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland, and here it is James Mason and Margaret Lockwood who stand out more than Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger. (Of the four it was Lockwood who was the biggest star when the film was made; Mason and Granger, later to become big names in both Britain and Hollywood were young actors in the early part of heir career)'
Mason and Lockwood were later to star together in another Gainsborough melodrama, "The Wicked Lady", probably the best remembered of the series. In that film too, Lockwood played a beautiful but ruthless and amoral woman with a more innocent friend, and Mason played her lover. Her Hesther, like Becky Sharp, is from a lower social station than her friend and an ambitious social climber, although she is more evil than Becky, or for that matter Scarlett, ever knew how to be. Lockwood, however, did not only play villainesses; she was to play the heroine in "Jassy", a third Gainsborough melodrama.
Mason's Rohan is a particularly well-drawn character- a drinker, gambler, womaniser and brawler, an arrogant, cynical, dissolute libertine who never does an honourable thing and yet remains very touchy about his honour, so touchy that he is prepared to kill anyone whom he believes has dishonoured him. His family motto is "Who Dishonours Us, Dies." Lady Caroline Lamb's famous description of Lord Byron as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" could apply to Rohan- perhaps even better than it did to Byron.
Today, Gainsborough melodramas like this one and "The Wicked Lady" can come across as very dated and more than a little camp, with their exaggerated emotion, their exaggeratedly black-and-white view of the world and their exaggerated style of acting. Our tastes in Regency drama today tend more to quiet, well-mannered adaptations of that quiet, well-mannered author Jane Austen, someone whom the British cinema ignored altogether in the forties. (The only screen adaptation of her work from the period was the American-made "Pride and Prejudice"). Yet, if we can make allowances for lurid, blood-and-thunder plots and stylised, non-naturalistic acting, they can still yield plenty of entertainment. 7/10
