Woman of Straw

122 minutesCountryUnited KingdomLanguageEnglishBudget$1.7 million^[1]

Woman of Straw is a 1964 British crime thriller directed by Basil Dearden and starring Gina Lollobrigida and Sean Connery.^[2][3] It was written by Robert Muller and Stanley Mann, adapted from the 1954 novel La Femme de paille by Catherine Arley.^[4]

Playboy Tony Richmond schemes to acquire the fortune of his uncle Charles Richmond, a tyrannical, wheelchair-using tycoon, by persuading Maria, the new personal nurse he has hired, to marry the old man. After his uncle's demise Maria becomes a murder suspect. Lollobrigida's character is the Woman of Straw of the title.

The film was shot at Pinewood Studios, Audley End House in Saffron Walden, Essex and in Majorca in the Balearic Islands between August and October 1963.^[5] The Majorca footage, including much footage in a boat off the coast, was shot on location in September 1963. Gina Lollobrigida was reportedly "demanding and temperamental" during the filming, frequently clashing with Connery and Dearden.^[5]

The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "With three accomplished performers, a well-handled supporting cast (led by the ever-reliable Alexander Knox), with palatial settings and a harmonious sense of colour, this run-of-the-mill melodrama could hardly fail to offer a mild thrill or two. Richardson has the eyes to penetrate one's nerve when the dark glasses of a dead man slip; and Sean Connery turns up a contemporary-type Hamlet, sneer, sable and all, capable of showing any of his prototypes how to deal with the cowardice of conscience. But this type of script needs a flamboyant sense of dramatic symbolism to bring it to life – a towering Wellesian view of a lift climbing slowly past arches and chandeliers, a more shattering use of the visual imagery of polished cars such as Losey can make, a touch of Hitchcock to sharpen suspense and turn the howl of a dog into something inhuman instead of noises off. Any film of such glamorous pretensions cannot fail to evoke memories of what can be done with similar material. Even Beethoven echoing from yacht to shore fails to carry the titanic irony of Richmond's necromantic homecoming, and the reason lies, as so often in British films, in a reluctant approach to the theme."^[6]

In The New York Times, Eugene Archer wrote, "what could be more archaic than the sight of James Bond himself, Sean Connery, stalking glumly through the very type of old-fashioned thriller he usually mocks? That is exactly what we have in "Woman of Straw," and you can be certain that Mr. Connery did not look one bit more unhappy than yesterday's audience at the Criterion, where the hapless British film crept into town. For, despite the fancy trappings laid on by the respected old producer-director team of Michael Relph and Basil Dearden, this handsomely colored exercise is the kind of pseudo-Victorian nonsense that Alfred Hitchcock long ago laid to rest".^[7]

• Woman of Straw at IMDb
• Woman of Straw at AllMovie
• Woman of Straw at the TCM Movie Database
• Woman of Straw at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films
• Woman of Straw at Rotten Tomatoes
• Woman of Straw then-and-now location photographs at ReelStreets