Black Velvet Gown
an historical melodrama movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5
Meets Expectations: -1
Apparent Rating: 4
This was another movie where the title has very little to do with what happens and the description of the movie even less so. The summary of the movie says it’s about a widow who takes a housekeeping job and the master falls for her and then leaves her the house but society around her is very intolerant of jumped up servants aping gentry.
If you’re interested in this movie stop here. There will be spoilers. If you’re reading from the RSS feed, you won’t see the fold I inserted here.
The bechilded widow takes a housekeeping job and the master does leave her the house. He opens his heart because they (all of them, woman and children) can read and write. But he falls for her son and oversteps the bounds of “fatherly” behavior and the son fends him off by stabbing him with a sickle, several times. The master is lamed forever and the son leaves. The widow wants to go also because she has a new man who wants to marry her, but the master says if she leaves, he’ll tell the authorities what her son did and he’ll hang.
Fast forward 8 years and the daughter has learned all the lessons that the son would have gotten, Latin and French and philosophy. The master dies and leaves the house to the mother on the condition that she cannot leave nor sell nor marry and if she does, the house goes to her daughter. But the solicitors tell her this in a private conference and the daughter is not told anything but that the house has been left to them. There is no money left for maintenance, so they have a sudden need of cash money and the girl is taken into laundress service. It’s completely unclear why this would be the choice made since obviously she’d be more suited to a governess role, and makes the mother look punitive.
The laundry of the great house is straight out of Dickens’ nightmares only without the grime filter and lack of lighting. (The cinematography in this was very watchable.) Including gentry adult-children who push laundresses into vats of caustic washing and whip them for crying out. But at night it’s all A Little Princess where the widow’s daughter (who is really the heiress) teaches her fellow laundresses to write and read. The laundress girl is continually on report for being uppity and showing off and corrupting the other servants. Eventually the girl’s ways are brought to the matriarch who thinks she’s evil but wants to save face so the girl becomes the old lady’s maid.
The girl overhears the aristocratic doctor (who knows the solicitors who did the will saying she was an heiress) telling her new mistress that she’s coming into property. Some more plot happens but when she goes home finally, with her new fiance, her mother tells the daughter that she is really the inheritor. The daughter has no grudge against her mother for this. I thought that was bizarre because I’d be very angry to be indentured (payment every 6 months is effectively indenturing, though shorter term) somewhere that abuses its employees when I was an educated person.
The story is vaguely interesting. It tries to drive home that education makes all the difference, but completely fails because the mother didn’t even try to get her daughter a learned position, just wanted to punish her for being named in the will. Calling it the Black Velvet Gown, which was a singular prop used twice in the first quarter of the movie and never mentioned again seems more than a little strange. The happy ending where the new fiance agrees that they will teach girls in their new school seemed unrealistic and unsupported.
All in all, this wasn’t really a singular movie, it’s more of a mash-up of several movies… Some Austen, some Dickens, some Burnett, some Bronte. It was entertaining, but a bad title and inapt summary skewed my expectations. This movie did not meet my expectations at all. If someone had said it was a fairly decent period history movie with a less depressing ending than usual, I might be quite pleased with it. As it stands, it was much less of a romance than a historical melodrama about a pedophile teacher.
