Scilla (Wendy Craig), a lounge singer, leaves her husband Lewis (Francis Matthews), a producer of a TV variety show. Why? Well… that’s hard to say succinctly. While we get a big fight prior to the opening credits, we’re never really privy to what it’s actually about and when questioned about it she says that ultimately the split had been brewing for a while, so whatever it was was just the straw that broke the camel’s back rather than of any especial importance. Moving into a slightly run down flat which is under the aegis of a family friend (John Wood), she sets about living her best life, although this may require figuring out what her best life actually would be. Meanwhile, her husband is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She was a regular fixture on his show and, suffice to say, won’t be turning up anymore, and the other ‘talent’ that can be found is… questionable, at best. The higher ups are not pleased and his job hangs precariously in the balance.

Just Like a Woman marks the directorial debut of Robert Fuest, who is probably best remembered for the Dr Phibes films (1971 and 1972) and various episodes of The Avengers (1961-1969). While you might expect that he got this made based on the strength of his Avengers work, in actuality it was apparently this film that got him directing gigs on the show, helming a bunch of episodes of the Tara King era. While that whole period of the show was a bit of a mess, both behind the scenes and frankly on screen, it’s hard to deny that its sense of style was through the roof. That, incidentally, is kind of a half-truth; he actually started out doing production design on The Avengers in the early ‘60s as an employee of Associated British’s TV arm before leaving to make this film which resulted in him being hired back as a freelance director. Just Like a Woman shows off the same sort of flair that he brought to his work on The Avengers and Dr Phibes as well as his later adaptation of The Final Programme (1973), albeit to a different end as, unlike much of his oeuvre, it is not a genre film.

‘Genre fiction’ is kind of a stupid term, isn’t it? Well, still that’s by the by.

While those aforementioned things are comedies, it’s mixed therein with some other trapping. Aside from perhaps the broad category of ‘drama’, this doesn’t really cross-pollinate its comedy with anything and frankly even describing it as a comedy-drama feels like it's considerably pushing it; the former well outweighs the latter. It’s more of a comedy with the odd serious bit. It’s the sort of tone that seems somewhat odd for a film of this vintage, particularly when juxtaposed with its gaudy pop-arty and surreal aesthetic and often absurd sense of humour. The core plot is honestly pretty simplistic; having been told by her husband that she won’t make it on her own and will come crawling back, the heroine comes to flourish while it’s her aforementioned husband who flounders. I suppose by the standards of the day, such a premise was pretty feminist for a mainstream movie. I suppose its mainstreamness is debatable, as it wasn’t backed by any of the major players of the era, but you can actually find contemporary adverts for it playing the Rank cinema circuit. (Apparently, they screened it as a support feature for Joseph Losey’s Accident (1967), which firstly seems like an odd pairing, and secondly probably doesn’t do much for my suggestion of mainstreamness.) Don’t interpret all that as it being some kind of lost feminist masterpiece, mind you. For one thing, that rather overstates the quality of the film as a whole, but also it doesn’t really dwell on those implications particularly. It’s all open to interpretation quite how progressive its view of the matter is.

It's worth noting perhaps that, despite its very Swinging ‘60s aesthetic, the cast are older than the typical film of its type and are written as such. It doesn’t really try and pretend that Wendy Craig and co. are twenty somethings, instead placing most of the cast well into adulthood (the only exceptions being Barry Fantoni as an unwrangleable popstar and Adam Adamant’s Juliet Harmer as a young starlet that Lewis tries to sleaze upon). It’s perhaps somewhat accidental, I imagine the casting was in many ways just who they could get, this nevertheless serves to give it somewhat of a different feel to most films set in the scene. Craig hadn’t become British TV’s go-to sitcom mum just yet (though it didn’t take that long; Not In Front of the Children started a couple of months after the film saw release and seemingly saw her typecast for the next decade or so),† though at this point her thing seemed to be highly strung upper middle class women, most notably in The Servant (1963) and The Nanny (1965). In the latter of which she does actually play the mother, so, I don’t know, maybe it was like a lateral move. 

I’ve seen it suggested that the film would work better with someone like Diana Rigg in the lead. Honestly, I’m not certain this is true, or at least the take away would be a bit different. Wendy Craig, cast against both her then established type and her soon to be established type, presents a rather more unusual figure than someone more (to be frank) glamourous, such as the aforementioned Diana Rigg, who pretty much was the face of the empowered woman on British telly of the mid-‘60s thanks to (wait for it) her role in The Avengers. Well, I suppose that depends on how you’re defining the term ‘empowered woman’, but regardless I expect audiences of the time wouldn’t exactly be on tenterhooks seeing someone known for playing a glamourous woman who can obviously take care of herself‡ playing a glamourous woman who can surprisingly take care of herself. Obviously, she could do it, but it seems like the baggage brought would result in a rather different feeling film. Craig’s associated baggage is obviously pretty different, as is the idea of glamour surrounding her portrayal of the character; she doesn’t really seem like she’s supposed to be playing an especially glamourous figure. It makes a degree of sense; she’s only meant to be, like, a cabaret singer rather than a great star. She’s just a slightly older woman, jobbing in minor show business, and Craig brings a good balance between swagger and vulnerability to the role.

On a similar note, Francis Matthews brings a rather eclectic performance as her husband, playing him as a rather effete luvvie type. It feels like a more typical film would want someone more akin to an Oliver Reed sort à la I’ll Never Forget What’s ’Isname (1967). I am frankly not familiar enough with his work to know if this is also against type for him. (He was in stuff that I’ve seen, but apparently didn’t leave that much of an impression. He actually seems best remembered for being the voice of the eponymous Captain Scarlet (1967-1968)… this is not that.)

It’s probably pretty good that the performances are good, because the plotting is, as suggested, pretty thin with little overarching narrative; Scilla has a series of progressively weirder misadventures that are only loosely connected to one another, while Lewis has his woes at not-ABC* that we’re only somewhat privy to. The actual story is rather beside the point, I guess, as it’s more about the characters’ own development. This is an area where the film oddly tends to succeed. While both the scenarios and the visual design of the vignettes are outlandish, increasingly so (on that front, it does eventually start to feel like an Avengers episode with the spy stuff removed; Scilla’s thread eventually results in her meeting with an eccentric German architect who commands a staff clad as great war era pilots), when the film starts delving into the emotions of the characters and reflections on their relationships, it’s done in a fairly earnest and believable way. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that film’s main appeal was in its impeccable visual flair, but it’s not without merit otherwise. It doesn’t all land; it pulls some punches, particularly with regard to the ending, and the fact that it never really calls out Lewis’ sexist attitudes (despite it being undermined by both his wife and especially his Verity Lambert-esque co-producer (Miriam Karlin) constantly in a manner that suggests we’re not really supposed to be siding with him) seems to cause a fair bit of consternation in modern reviews; but it’s a wittier and more considered film than many of its better known (and perhaps regarded) contemporaries.

† Then, of course, she was old (or ‘old’), so she might as well have been dead so far as TV was concerned. At least, until she was of an age where they could pull the grande dame card.

‡ Well, sort of. I complain a lot about how when they switched to colour, a lot more episodes have Mrs Peel get captured by the villains du jour in the last act. I pondered if it was a sop to the American market, as that was where the money to actually make it in colour came from; noticeably a lot of the more risqué elements got jettisoned at around the same time.

* You occasionally see stuff online, to the extent that there is much online about the film, that says he’s meant to be a BBC producer. This is flagrantly wrong, as the dialogue is pretty explicit that the broadcaster for which he works is not the BBC, with people at the studios lamenting that they don’t get the sort of perks that BBC people get. One assumes it’s based on ABC-TV instead, given as a sizable portion of the crew, Fuest included (as mentioned earlier), came from there. Write what you know and all that.