Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsA real feel-good film!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 January 2024
If you need cheering up or don't want anything too heavy then this is the film for you. It's a feel-good film throughout with nothing scary or tragic about it and everything comes right in the end.
Basically it's about a cleaning lady in the 1950's who's forever waiting for her husband to come home from the war. She has simple dreams, like owning a Dior dress that she's seen in one of her client's wardrobes. The woman is wealthy enough to own this beautiful hand-made dress but never seems to have enough money to pay Mrs. Harris for her cleaning services. Mrs. Harris is forever scrimping and scraping but she always cherishes a dream to have a gorgeous Dior dress of her own one day and starts to save up from her meagre wages. One day she foolishly bets the money she's so carefully saved on a friend's greyhounds and loses it all. After that, she's determined not to waste a penny and finally saves up enough for her dream dress, more so after a man from the RAF turns up unexpectedly and tells her her husband died years ago in the war and she's owed loads of pension money. Then her friend (who has romantic intentions) tells her the greyhound she bet on was nobbled and he'd got some of the money back, bet it on another dog and it had won back her stake and more.
So, she's in the pink again and departs for Paris, innocently rocking up at the Dior fashion house with her money in rolls in her handbag. Obviously they are too stuck-up to let her in but a kindly French aristocrat who has gone to attend a catwalk show, takes her in to the show on his arm and she explains her simple dream to him. Unfortunately for her, a nasty woman, who's a long-standing, supposedly wealthy client, hears her and deliberately chooses every dress from the collection that she does and at the end of the show, when Mrs. Harris tells the attendant which dress she'd like to be made for her, the nasty woman shoves in and pulls rank so Mrs. H has to settle for her second choice, a green dress, which, although beautiful, is not the gorgeous red one she really wants.
The dress is finally made and Mrs. H takes it home, only to lend it to one of her clients, a feckless girl who hopes of being a film star. The girl gets the lovely dress burned by standing too near a fire at an influential ball and Mrs. H's dream dress is ruined without her ever having worn it. She gets depressed and various friends try to cheer her up but nothing works until a massive box arrives from Paris containing the dress she originally wanted. The nasty woman, it turns out, wasn't wealthy at all and never paid Dior for any of her stuff - her husband was carted off by the French police as a fraudster and the dress she chose to spite Mrs. H was never made, so Mrs. H got her dream red dress after all.
Apparently, the hopeful starlet who'd borrowed her dress had melted it on purpose to get publicity and she did - it was all over the world papers, so, the Dior fashion house got to know about it and felt sorry for Mrs. H because, whilst she was in Paris, she made a lot of friends at the fashion house and made them realise that ordinary people like her actually paid for their stuff whilst the so-called wealthy clients rarely did. They eventually changed their policy about exclusivity, making Dior fashion more readily available for everyday people.
Running through the whole film is a moral tale about wealth vs poverty. It juxtaposes how poor but respectable people will always try to pay their way whilst the wealthy will always blag their way out of paying for anything even though they can easily afford it. None of this is shoved in your face, it's just light hearted, bright and cheerful, with a lovely side-line love story between a disillusioned model and a Dior worker who come out on top just like the redoubtable Mrs. Harris does.