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Plaisir d'amour, chagrin d'amour. A little joke early on evokes the savagery tucked behind 19th-century good manners, the peddler's hatchet slams down on the fish's head, the maiden (Olivia de Havilland) looks the other way. "Not a shred of poise," all at sea at the fancy society ball, twisting nervously until her aunt (Miriam Hopkins) sticks a fan in her hands. "You embroider neatly" is the best her leonine father (Ralph Richardson) comes up with when searching for something nice to say about her. She's surprised as much as she's delighted when the impecunious dreamboat (Montgomery Clift) comes a-courting, to love her "for all those who didn't." The only cruelty worse than Dad suggesting the fellow is after her fortune is him turning out to be correct. "Well, that has a harsh sound, but it's about the truth." The Henry James realm, the severest interiors set to simmer by William Wyler with staircases and doorways and mirrors for an arena of most civilized brutality. Education of the "willing victim," maladroit with society's rituals then luxuriating in poison. The turning point is a long night in the mansion's parlor, where the imaginary romance of a clandestine elopement withers as the heroine waits and waits with suitcase in hand. (Her defeated climb back to her chamber the next morning finds a figure hardening with each dolorous step.) The patriarch sees his ruling as a doctor's diagnosis, he brings a stethoscope to his own chest to detect the lethal chill first felt at a European café, a deathbed reconciliation is denied as part of his daughter's revenge. Her caustic triumph is a simple matter of scissoring the last thread on her embroidered canvas, "as they say in the melodramas." (Her faint smile as the returning beau howls outside points up a kinship with her doomed-exalted sisters from Jezebel and The Letter.) The line of influence passes through Lean's Madeleine and Visconti's Senso and arrives at the culmination of Dreyer's Gertrud. Cinematography by Leo Tover. With Vanessa Brown, Betty Linley, Ray Collins, Mona Freeman, Selena Royle, Paul Lees, Harry Antrim, and Russ Conway. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |