Harris stole the film over some pretty formidable competition. Laurence Harvey stars as an aging roué who tries to help his daughter's troubled marriage relating his own amorous exploits to his son-in-law. What follows are five episodes, each with its own style, detailing his involvements with a free thinker (Diane Cilento), a diplomat's sophisticated wife (Eva Gabor) and a sympathetic nurse (Mai Zetterling), among others. It's Harris's vignette, however, as a young painter who only wants Harvey's love, that provides the film with its heart and its standout moments. Even though her character gets less benefit from Cecil Beaton's sumptuous costume designs than the other women, she's the one viewers, and Harvey, cannot forget.
The Truth About Women was only Harris's fourth film and her first in two years. Her stage magic never quite translated to the screen, despite an Oscar®-nominated debut in The Member of the Wedding (1952) and her later appearance in the cult classic horror film The Haunting (1963). She would later say, "Pictures make me look like a 12-year-old boy who flunked his body-building course." Yet on stage and television she quickly rose to a position as one of America's best actresses and the most honored performer in Broadway history, with ten Tony nominations and five wins (only Angela Lansbury has won as often). By the time Harris made The Truth About Women, she had already received two Tony Awards, for I Am a Camera and The Lark. This was her second of three films in a row in the British Isles. She had filmed I Am a Camera there -- with Harvey co-starring as her platonic best friend, based on writer Christopher Isherwood -- and would return for the Irish drama The Poacher's Daughter (1958).
Harvey was building a solid reputation as a young leading man at the time and would rise to stardom with the gritty working-class drama Room at the Top (1959), which brought him an Oscar® nomination for Best Actor and brought co-star Simone Signoret the Best Actress trophy. For a moment, he was the face of England's Angry Young Man. That it didn't last was as much a function of the curse of success as of his own taste for the high life, which often led him to sign for less than promising roles. He quickly moved to Hollywood, where a series of thankless roles and stiff, detached performances gradually diminished his star status. He was Elizabeth Taylor's society love in Butterfield 8 (1960), the romantic drifter in Walk on the Wild Side (1962) and the tormented medical student in the 1964 screen version of Of Human Bondage. He did have one great role during that period, however, the brainwashed son of a political family in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). A return to England brought him two more good roles, in the sequel to Room at the Top, Life at the Top, and the trend-setting mod drama Darling (both 1965).
A rarity for the period, The Truth About Women was directed by a woman, Muriel Box. Primarily known as a writer, Box was most famous for The Seventh Veil (1945), a psychological romance about a beautiful young pianist (Ann Todd) who can't play. The film brought her an Oscar® shared with her husband and co-writer, Sydney Box. Box had begun directing in 1941 with the short wartime propaganda film The English Inn and moved into features in 1949 with The Lost People. Her husband briefly took over Gainsborough Pictures in the late '40s, but that studio's head, Michael Balcon, didn't think women suited for directing. That was one of the reasons Sydney Box created London Independent Producers, where he produced his wife's later directing efforts. The failure of her final film Rattle of a Simple Man (1964), ended Muriel Box's movie career. After the two divorced, she focused on writing and launched the feminist publishing company Femina.
The Truth About Women offers a surprisingly feminist take on the battle of the sexes. Although there's something inhuman about some of the women Harvey encounters--Gabor's Frenchwoman who refuses marriage when she's free because he's not wealthy enough and an American heiress who dumps him for a bigger title--the most important women in his life are struggling with a world that treats them as property. Harris is blissfully happy as Harvey's wife, but her painting suffers. After her death, an art dealer asks to see what she's produced since she married. Harvey only has a handful of pictures to show him, each unfinished and with a note in the corner stating what interrupted her work, which is usually a crisis with her children. When Zetterling's husband resurfaces and sues Harvey for alienation of affections, it leads to a spirited courtroom discussion of a woman's financial worth. At the end, when Harvey's son-in-law complains that he wants his wife to be more domestic and act like a woman, Harvey's wife suggests the young woman is indeed acting like a woman. To her, however, that means being a human being. Box's film reflects the broad range of humanity among the female of the species and the limits placed on that humanity by an unenlightened society.
Producer: Sydney Box
Director: Muriel Box
Screenplay: Muriel and Sydney Box
Cinematography: Otto Heller
Art Direction: George Provis
Score: Bruce Montgomery
Cast: Laurence Harvey (Sir Humphrey Tavistock), Julie Harris (Helen Cooper), Diane Cilento (Ambrosine Viney), Mai Zetterling (Julie), Eva Gabor (Louise), Michael Denison (Rollo), Roland Culver (Charles Tavistock), Wilfrid Hyde-White (Sir George Tavistock), Ambrosine Phillpotts (Lady Tavistock), Lisa Gastoni (Mary Maguire), Christopher Lee (Francois), Marius Goring (Otto Kerstein), Thorley Walters (Trevor), Ernest Thesiger (Judge). C-107m.
by Frank Miller
