Margaret Lockwood (Barbara) is the wicked lady in question and there is no doubt that she is wicked. She is brilliant and very funny in some scenes. As is highwayman James Mason (Jackson). Lockwood is ruthlessly driven by wealth and excitement and she is brutal when it comes to revenge or getting what she wants.Mason's entry into the film is a cracker as always. In this film, we have him watching dumbfounded from a hill as Lockwood robs a stagecoach on his patch. She's pretty good at it and an alliance is struck. The rest of the cast all do well in their roles – perhaps Patricia Roc (Caroline) is a bit too gentle in her reactions given how Lockwood is treating her.The dialogue is entertaining as is its delivery by all concerned and we get great costumes and settings. Hooray for Gainsborough!

Margaret Lockwood portrays a real 17th century tramp in this 1945 film which really has some amateurish writing when you think of it.Ms. Lockwood steals her cousin's fiancée on the day of the latter's wedding. She does it in faster mode than when Scarlett O'Hara stole Frank Kennedy from Sue Ellen in "Gone With the Wind."Barbara (Lockwood) could never be satisfied with one man. She goes from man to man. The woman has more lust in her life than can ever be imagined. She even cavorts with Michael Rennie on her wedding day.When she loses a brooch to her stuffy sister-in-law, she embarks upon a career of crime as a highway robber to get it back.This is a story of a woman who could not be with a man for a moment. James Mason appears as her new lover and fellow thief.Patricia Roc is sympathetic and overly sweet as Caroline, the cousin who lost her fiancée and stays on in the house. To think, we thought that Olivia De Havilland was such a sap in "Gone With the Wind." Roc even has her beat here.Of course, we can't allow for Barbara to get away with a life of crime as well as murder. She gets better with a gun than Annie Oakley did and kills 2 people along the way. Poor old, Felix Aylmer, she does him in via the poison route. What a fool he plays, quoting from the bible while actually believing that Barbara will reform.The ending is of course that Barbara gets what she deserves so that husband Griffin Jones should be able to go back to Caroline, the woman he should not have ditched to begin with. Imagine, Jones and Rennie were willing to switch women, but this was unknown to Barbara so she plots to put a bullet in Jones but instead, she gets shot by lover Rennie in her disguise as a robber!Come on. The writing here is actually churlish.

I grew up loving this film and its still amazing fun with drama, sex (1940s style)double crossing and corsets. Lockwood is at her best and looks stunning throughout the film. A great British cast with James Mason, Patricia Roc and Michael Rennie who looked incredibly sexy and when you consider his other work it hard to believe its the same man. Barbara Worth is in my opinion the most wicked lady ever put on film .What I'll comment on is that I got a friend to watch it recently and said this is the most wicked woman on film, which left her unimpressed until she watched and then agreed whole heartedly that Lockwood is the most wicked lady ever put on the silver screen. Its campy, overly dramatic and glamorous, what more could you want from a 1940s classic!

The spoilers in this review are offered as a public service, because the only way to enjoy this costume melodrama is to know that our protagonist, the Lady Barbara Skelton, gets gunned down in the end. And not a moment too soon. I'd have shot the screen myself but I was afraid I'd hit James Mason.The original 1943 novel, called "The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton" (I guess people didn't whine about spoilers back then), was written by a woman who tackles shallow beauty head-on. Her heroine is devastatingly gorgeous (well, Margaret Leighton isn't my idea of a Venus, but never mind) and she seems to think that if you have beauty, nothing else matters. But other things do matter, such as the fact that Lady Barbara's immediate and only response when someone gets in her way is homicide. She murders three men in five attempts. A serial femme fatale, she's got a case of dissocial personality disorder that should have landed her in either Bedlam or Newgate. Lockwood plays her as a narcissistic vamp, wearing so much makeup that I thought of her as a Restoration-era Joan Rivers (or a restoration- era Joan Rivers, ha!). Yet Lady B. is irresistible to all three principal male characters-- Michael Rennie, James Mason, and Griffith Jones, all of whom do good work, as does Patricia Roc. Of course, all three admirers realize in short order what a psychotic bitch Barbara is, but the plot keeps them all in her orbit until one of them finally does gun her down - accidentally, in what is meant to be either irony or just desserts. Given the dramatic death scene with a boom lifting the camera out through the windows and heavenward, I presume we're meant to give a damn about her death. Which I guess I did, if "give a damn" can be expressed in a rousing cheer.