Elizabeth of Ladymead (1948)

I want to live here and really feel it’s mine. Liz (Anna Neagle) lives in the beautiful Georgian mansion of Ladymead and awaits the arrival home of her husband  (Hugh Williams) who’s been away for five years fighting in WW2. They soon argue about what he must do – she’s put the house on the market with the intention of returning to London so that he can resume his career in politics, as she and her mother (Isabel Jeans) plan. He however just wants to stay at home and tend the garden. During a fight she walks into a wall she thinks is a door and drifts asleep and dreams about other women who lived in the house who have shared her name and plight. Beth, lives in 1854 London, as the Crimean War rages thousands of miles away. When her husband (Nicholas Phipps) returns he expresses disgruntlement at her ideas that she should even have an opinion about anything. The second, Elizabeth, lives in 1903, just after the Boer war. She has made the farm profitable and embarrassed her husband (Bernard Lee) by becoming a suffragette and sympathising with the Boers. The third, Betty, is a girl of 1919, the year after World War I. She has led a life of such independence she no longer requires a husband (Michael Lawrence) since she has been taking lovers since his departure. Each of the four Elizabeths emerges as a woman of independence while the menfolk are off to war and some of the men do not survive the return … Miss Nightingale is very remarkable but as a woman she’s a freak. From the husband and wife team of producer/director Herbert Wilcox and actress Anna Neagle this is an imaginative way to tackle post-war malaise and the changing roles of the sexes or as the titles inform us, The changing role of the girl he left behind. Adapted by co-star (and regular Wilcox collaborator) Nicholas Phipps from a play by Frank Harvey, the transitions from the framing narrative of post-WW2 dissatisfaction are neatly achieved, Neagle has a range of emotions to play in each incarnation and it’s very well managed from era to era, shot in stunning Technicolor. An intriguing picture of society and how women are perceived as they struggle to attain individuation as part of a married couple. We must put it down to the instability of the female

Nurse Edith Cavell (1939)

How can we stop? British nurse Edith Cavell (Anna Neagle) is stationed at a private hospital in Brussels during World War I. When the son of a former patient escapes from a German prisoner-of-war camp, she helps him escape to Holland. Outraged at the number of soldiers detained in the camps, Edith, along with a group of sympathisers, devises a plan to help the prisoners escape, assisting hundreds of men. As the group works to free the soldiers, Edith must keep her activities secret from the Germans but the investigation closes in… The law which is good enough for Germans is good enough for these people.  Adapted by Michael Hogan from Dawn by Reginald Berkeley, this is straightforwardly filmed but no less affecting for that. The true story of a nurse tried by secret German military tribunal, refused legal counsel and condemned to death on the word of a child is another instance of German treachery in wartime. A key film in the career of Anna Neagle, she is directed here by future husband Herbert Wilcox (who had previously directed a version of this starring Sybil Thorndike) alongside George Sanders as Captain Heinrichs, Edna May Oliver as local noblewoman Madame Rappard and Zasu Pitts as Madame Moulin.  An impressive production, nicely photographed by Freddie Young. I have seen death so often it is no longer strange or fearful to me