So many movies and TV shows entertain through depictions of crime and emotional loss, and so it’s a pleasure to spend a couple hours with a well-produced adult fairy tale. The movie is the latest adaptation of Paul Gallico’s 1958 novel. It is Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, and it is aimed for the sometimes-neglected audience of older women. The film arrived in theaters mid-summer, and is now available for streaming and on disc.
Mrs. Harris is the sort of entertainment that is seen mainly on the Hallmark Channel. A woman endures struggles and winds up having a great adventure, even a romance. In the case of Mrs. Harris, the central character is an older woman who lives in the Battersea district of London in 1957. Ada Harris, a rather drab war widow who cleans houses for a living, eyes a gorgeous Dior evening gown in the home of one of her high-born employers. So enthralled is she with this marvel of haute couture that she vows to save enough money, 500 quid, to travel to Paris and buy a Dior gown for herself.
The premise of this film seems dated, even silly, to me. As I watched, I was starting to be judgmental. I don’t have a single friend in this age and gender group who wants to save an enormous amount of money to buy a designer gown. What would I think of her if I had such a friend! But I soon lightened up and fell under its spell. I concluded that this movie is a fantasy, a fairy tale. If dear Mrs. Harris had wanted a child instead of a gown, she would have come back from Paris with a delightful orphan to raise. That’s just the way life goes in fairy tales!
Once I accepted the genre, I settled down and realized the outstanding factor that makes this movie work, even for doubters such as myself. It’s not only Gallico’s highly imagined, heartfelt story, and not the capable direction by Anthony Fabian. Fabian’s most highly praised film is Skin, 2008, about a white Afrikaner couple who gives birth to a black baby in South Africa.
No. The outstanding factor is the actress who plays the title role of the charwoman with a heart of gold. Lesley Manville. Manville, whom many are watching in Magpie Murders on PBS, plays Ada Harris with such sensitivity. Manville is one of the most under-valued artists on theater and home screens, although she was nominated for an Oscar in 2018 for Phantom Thread and has BAFTA nods. She stands out in the British TV series Mum, River, and the recent murder mystery series Sherwood. Manville imparts to Mrs. Harris’s early scenes a vulnerability, a timidity. Later, she plays the developing character as confident with an iron will.
Other actresses have played Mrs. Harris, and their performances are also praiseworthy. Angela Lansbury starred in a TV movie called Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris (the Cockney pronunciation), a special that first aired Christmas week of 1992 and is available for home viewing. Interestingly, Lansbury’s Mrs. Harris is not a war widow, but a spinster. The Germans produced a series of six TV movies. Back in 1958, when the novel was newly published, the great British star Gracie Fields played Ada Harris for an episode of Studio One. I’d like to see that episode, but apparently it isn’t available for viewing. A few years ago, a British musical production was launched, and a recording was made.
Gallico wrote four light-hearted novels about Mrs. Harris. The one currently called Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris originally was titled Flowers for Mrs. Harris. By the way, do you know that Gallico’s childrens’ books so influenced J.K. Rowling’s childhood reading that his writing impacted her Harry Potter novels? Really!
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and retired appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and co-authored several entertainment biographies with her late husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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