The Passionate Stranger

Judith Wynter is a writer of pulp romances whose characters and dilemmas she bases on her immediate surroundings. Does reality really always know best? Doesn’t purple prose have a liberating wisdom all its own? A meditation on the different virtues found in fantasy and in real life, rendered in delirious colour and luscious black-and-white.

Muriel Box was the only female filmmaker busy at the highest level of 1950s and 60s British cinema, chalking up 14 fiction features (plus a short) between 1949 (The Lost People, co-dir Bernard Knowles) and 1964 (Rattle of a Simple Man), many of them popular successes. The Passionate Stranger is one of her most intriguing creations: a meditation on the different virtues found in fantasy and in real life.

Judith Wynter is a writer of pulp romances whose characters and dilemmas she bases on her immediate surroundings, be that her husband, or an accidental acquaintance. In her latest effort, also named The Passionate Stranger, she tries to come to grips with her muddled feelings for her husband – a struggle Box presents in a deliciously dialectic fashion. Judith’s day-to-day existence is shown in black-and-white, and her fictional life in gloriously luscious colours. On the surface, this is a tract on reality as the sole sphere where conflicts can be solved – but can they, nay, should they be solved without the benefit of first dreaming up other solutions, however lurid?

– Olaf Möller