So Evil My Love (Lewis Allen, 1948)

Ray Milland and Ann Todd in So Evil My Love

Cast: Ray Milland, Ann Todd, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Leo G. Carroll, Raymond Huntley, Raymond Lovell, Martita Hunt, Moira Lister, Roderick Lovell, Muriel Aked. Screenplay: Ronald Millar, Leonard Spiegelgass, based on a novel by Joseph Shearing. Cinematography: Mutz Greenbaum. Production design: Thomas N. Morahan. Film editing: Vera Campbell. Music: William Alwyn. 

So Evil My Love needs a better actress than the starchy Ann Todd to make its central premise work, that a respectable Victorian widow of an Anglican missionary would fall so hard for a handsome cad that she'd do anything from larceny to murder for him. It could also have used a more charismatic cad than Ray Milland in the role. We meet Olivia Harwood (Todd) on a ship returning to England from Jamaica, where she has buried her husband. When the ship's doctor asks her to help nurse some malaria patients on board, she agrees -- a little reluctantly, which is perhaps a sign that she's not as sweetly complaisant as she might be. One of the patients is traveling under the name Mark Bellis (Milland), which may not be his real name: He's an artist who makes his living by stealing valuable paintings and forging Rembrandts. A spark is lit between them, although we don't really see it because the actors have so little chemistry, and when they get back to London, Bellis makes his way to her doorstep. She owns a small house and lets out rooms, one of which he takes, though under the disapproving eye of her other tenant, the ostentatiously proper Miss Shoebridge (Muriel Aked). When Olivia allows Bellis to paint her, in an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, she relaxes her defenses and passion blossoms -- or what passes for it in the screenplay if not on the screen. Meanwhile, Olivia makes contact with an old school friend, Susan Courtney (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who is unhappily married to the wealthy and domineering Henry Courtney (Raymond Huntley). Susan has confessed her unhappiness, and her love for another man, Sir John Curle (Roderick Lovell), in letters to Olivia. When the affair between Bellis and Olivia develops, he finds the letter and sees the possibility of blackmailing Courtney, who is in line for a peerage that would be derailed by scandal. Under Bellis's spell, Olivia gets deeper and deeper into a plot that turns lethal. There's potential for real heat in the story, but miscast leads and a talky script undo it. 

The Passionate Friends (David Lean, 1949)

The Passionate Friends (David Lean, 1949)

Cast: Ann Todd, Claude Rains, Trevor Howard, Betty Ann Davies, Isabel Dean. Screenplay: Eric Ambler, David Lean, Stanley Haynes, based on a novel by H.G. Wells. Cinematography: Guy Green. Set designer: John Bryan. Film editing: Geoffrey Foot, Clive Donner, Jack Harris. Music: Richard Addinsell.

Madeleine (David Lean, 1950)

Ivan Desny and Ann Todd in Madeleine

Madeleine Smith: Ann Todd
William Minnoch: Norman Wooland
Emile L'Anglier: Ivan Desny
Mr. Smith: Leslie Banks
Mrs. Smith: Barbara Everest
Bessie Smith: Patricia Raine
Janet Smith: Susan Stranks
Christina Hackett: Elizabeth Sellars
Thuau: Eugene Deckers
Defending Counsel: André Morell
Prosecuting Counsel: Barry Jones
Dr. Thompson: Edward Chapman
Mrs. Jenkins: Jean Cadell

Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Stanley Haynes, Nicholas Phipps
Cinematography: Guy Green
Production design: John Bryan
Film editing: Clive Donner, Geoffrey Foot
Music: William Alwyn

I wanted Madeleine to have the emotional depth of Brief Encounter (1945) or the imaginative finesse of Oliver Twist (1948), just to sustain my argument that David Lean was a greater director before he aimed for the epic scale of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965). But even Lean would later admit that Madeleine is something of a dud. The story of an "unproven" murder -- the verdict the Glasgow jury returned at the trial of the real Madeleine Smith -- the film needs to generate a Hitchcockian tension that Lean never quite masters. One reason, I think, is that it stars the rather pallid Ann Todd, Lean's wife, who had played Madeleine Smith in a stage version of the story, when it needs a more accomplished and charismatic actress, a Deborah Kerr or a Jean Simmons, to bring out the ambiguities in the character. Todd rises to the role only in the final scene, when Madeleine rides away a free woman, a mysterious smile flickering across her face as the voiceover narrator questions whether she was guilty or not guilty. Otherwise, she generates little heat in her love scenes with Ivan Desny as L'Anglier* and the scene in which she throws him over for her father's choice as a fiancé, William Minnoch, comes as an abrupt about-face. Lean seems to be trying to do something with the character of the lover, including much business with his brandishing a phallic walking stick, but it doesn't come off. On the plus side, there are good performances by Leslie Banks as Madeleine's father, the quintessential tyrannical Victorian paterfamilias, and André Morell gives a rousing argument for the defense in the trial scene. Guy Green's chiaroscuro cinematography creates the proper mood, as do John Bryan's sometimes oppressive interiors.

*The spelling in the credits. The historical figure was called L'Angelier, which is also the way André Morell, playing the defense counsel, pronounces it.

The Paradine Case (Alfred Hitchcock, 1947)

Ann Todd and Charles Laughton in The Paradine Case

Anthony Keane: Gregory Peck
Gay Keane: Ann Todd
Lord Thomas Horfield: Charles Laughton
Simon Flaquer: Charles Coburn
Lady Sophie Horfield: Ethel Barrymore
Andre Latour: Louis Jourdan
Maddalena Anna Paradine: Alida Valli
Sir Joseph: Leo G. Carroll
Judy Flaquer: Joan Tetzel

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: David O. Selznick, Alma Reville, James Bridie
Based on a novel by Robert Hichens
Cinematography: Lee Garmes
Production design: J. McMillan Johnson

Alfred Hitchcock was at the end of his seven-year servitude to David O. Selznick when he was roped into The Paradine Case, a project Selznick had been nursing since 1933, when he bought the rights at MGM hoping to star Greta Garbo as the "fascinating" Mrs. Paradine. Garbo declined then and later, saying she didn't want to play a murderer. Hitchcock's involvement in the belated project was grudging, given that the other two features, Rebecca (1940) and Spellbound (1945), on which he had been forced to work directly with Selznick had been difficult experiences, producer and director having decidedly different views on almost everything about filmmaking. But he went ahead with crafting a screenplay, enlisting his wife, Alma Reville, playwright James Bridie, and Ben Hecht. In the end, however, Selznick rewrote the screenplay, sometimes after individual scenes had been shot, and claimed credit, relegating Reville to "adaptation" and Bridie to "treatment in consultation with," and leaving Hecht off the credits entirely. Moreover, Hitchcock's initial cut was three hours, which Selznick then scissored down to 132 minutes and after premieres to the extant 114 minutes. It's hard to say what was lost in the process, except that Anthony Keane's supposed erotic fascination with Mrs. Paradine barely registers in the current version, making Gay Keane's jealous moping almost nonsensical. It also robs the climax of the film of any real emotional impact. But miscasting also may be responsible for those failures: Gregory Peck, never a very interesting actor, becomes even duller in his attempts to play a distinguished British barrister. Peck was 31, and the gray streaks in his hair do little to convince us that he's a man with a long career at the bar. Moreover, his attempts at a British accent are fitful: You can almost see him tense up every time he has to pronounce "can't" as "cahn't." Alida Valli, in the key role, is more sullen than mysterious, and Ann Todd as Peck's wife, is pallid. What life exists in the film comes from Charles Coburn as the solicitor in the case and from Charles Laughton, deliciously haughty as the judge, with a reputation for enjoying hanging women as well as clear evidence of his sexually predatory nature when he makes his moves on Mrs. Keane. Ethel Barrymore for some reason was nominated for an Oscar for her small role as the judge's wife, who sweetly admonishes her husband for his ways, but otherwise has little to do. There is not much Hitchcock could do stylistically in the film with Selznick hanging around: He attempts some impressive long takes, many of which Selznick chopped up in the editing room, and an experiment in collaboration with cinematographer Lee Garmes in lighting changes during Keane's interrogation of Mrs. Paradine. He also introduces Louis Jourdan's character by keeping him in shadows and half darkness, to heighten our suspicion of the character's nature, but such occasional tricks only stand out from the general flatness of the drama.