Woman in a dressing gown - 1957

I hate it. It’s well done, well acted, and I hate it. It’s about a middle-aged man wanting to leave his wife for a much younger woman, and they make it look like it’s all her fault, even the title points to her and not to him; only the son is angry at him, for like a minute! At the end he comes back to them as if nothing happened.
Jim Preston (Anthony Quayle) works in an office. He’s been married twenty years, and with Amy (Yvonne Mitchell) he has a teenage son, Brian, who works in a factory, and they lost their daughter right after her birth. Amy gets up early every day and tries to do everything, but she starts a lot of things and never seems able to finish anything. The house is never tidy, she’s always late with the tea or the dinner, and always stays at home in her dressing gown. Georgie (Sylvia Syms) is the other woman. She works with him and she’s a lot younger, and she’s the usual type that you always see in the movies. The perfect kind. She’s in love with him and they’ve been together for months now. She asks Jim to tell his wife, she tells him that he deserves someone who can take good care of him.
Amy always listens to the music on the radio and is always cheerful; she’s always running around doing things but is very disorganized. She’s presented as a failure because she doesn’t have everything perfectly ready for her husband and son’s demands, because she’s unable to take good care of them and their house; well, who takes care of her? Who comforted her after her daughter died? Who gives her anything ever? When she learns that Jim wants a divorce so he can marry Georgie, she’s devastated, and she asks him what did she do wrong; she borrows a little money from her son and goes out to get her hair done, paying for it by pawning her engagement ring. She buys some whisky as a treat for Jim and goes home, but it started raining and she can’t get a bus or a taxy, so she gets home looking worse than when she got out. She tries to wear her pretty dress, but the zip breaks. She tries to arrange a good meal but the table breaks and everything falls on the floor. Her neighbour has her drink some of the whisky, so when the son comes home he finds her drunk on the floor, crying. 
She had asked Jim to bring Georgie home, to meet her and beg her to leave him to her, but all her plans went wrong. They now have a discussion, then she helps him pack a case and has him leave immediately with her. No point in waiting. 
Jim and Georgie go out together, but they haven’t gone far when he tells her that he can’t do it, and he goes back, saying that you can’t throw twenty years in a suitcase just like that. 
It really upset me how his only fault was to be a little weak, while Amy was presented as a big failure for not being a perfect housewife. But really, who ever took care of her? She never had her hair done, she has no money at all so that she has to beg her son for some and secretly pawns her own ring, her one good dress must be twenty years old itself since it breaks so easily when she tries to put it on, there’s nothing more than bacon eggs and tea in the house, she has nothing for herself, her whole life gravitated around her men, but she never cared about anything of it because she thought they were happy! Every morning and every night she was late with the food and the ironing, but she was always there with a cheerful smile and lots of love. Did anyone ever consider her needs? Did anyone ever have a nice word for her? She was a good loving person, helping her neighbour with her little baby, caring about people’s health and lives, and in her own words knowing her husband’s inside out and still loving him, that’s marriage. And he tells her that they were once happy but “now it’s just habit”, as if he ever did anything about it. The only true thing he says in the whole movie is at the end, when he leaves Georgie, and he tells her “maybe she is what she is because I am what I am”.
At least her son loves her, and for a moment gets angry at his father for walking out on his mother, but his next scene is to ask Georgie what kind of woman would do that to a family, as if again it was a woman’s fault. Who blames him, really? Is it either the wife’s fault for being sloppy or the other woman’s fault for loving a married man? It’s him the one who lied to his family and broke it apart!
Plus, when Amy told him that her lack of concentration might be an actual problem and that some pills might actually help her be better, he simply dismissed her as an excuse! He had no consideration for her at all! 

ITA l’adultero