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Melodrama. In the days of Charles II, Barbara visited a bride friend, stole the bridegroom and became Lady Skelton. But married life bored her and she took to highway robbery for excitement. She shot one man, poisoned another, had an affair with another whom she betrayed to the gallows, and was about to commit further murder when a bullet ended her career of crime.

With excellent photography from Jack Cox, lavish costuming and rich settings, this becomes a novelette on high-quality art paper. Nobody, surely, is expected to believe in its naive manner of narrative, its dialogue which wanders uncertainly between seventeenth and twentieth century 'idiom. And some of the sequences - notably those on the frozen Thames - are as false as ye olde teashoppe. From a box-office point of view these shortcomings will no doubt be proved negligible, but it is hardly surprising that, with the exception perhaps of Mason and Griffith Jones, none of the cast manages to be convincing. Mason swashbuckles through without a care whether his part is credible or not and Jones attempts some quiet work with patent sincerity. The Hays office, and its counterpart in many private homes, will perhaps find much to object to in the Caroline décolletage and the sexual situations which begin with wanton trading and culminate in rape.

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