This film features Joan Plowright as a prudish and angry dressmaker and Billie Whitelaw as her lusty sister who works in a munitions factory in Liverpool during 1944. Their contradictory views of life rage inside Rita (Jane Horrocks), their joyless 17-year-old niece who lives with them. When she falls in love with an American soldier from Mississippi, the emotions in their troubled family sizzle and swerve out of control. John McGrath has adapted Beryl Bainbrige’s 1973 novel for the screen with all of its dramatic dynamite intact. Jim O’Brien (“The Jewel in the Crown”) directs The Dressmaker and turns it into a riveting Victorian morality tale.