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On the Technicolor backlot, a Viennese view of English virtue. The heroine (Linda Darnell) starts as a foundling in the middle of the 17th-century Civil War, then doffs Puritan bonnet and lets her golden tresses flow to get the attention of the cavalier (Cornel Wilde). "A steady husband," rejected, rather a procession of peruked clods, highwayman (John Russell) to captain (Glenn Langan) to earl (Richard Haydn) to king (George Sanders). A Shakespeare performance cannot compete with the heroine's machinations, heads in the audience turn to the mistress in the royal box caught in flagrante. "There's always a chance that he might not hang you. He might merely have your nose slit or boil you in oil." Swindled and imprisoned in London, single mother and robbery accomplice, stage actress and palace lady, the search for a title—the Otto Preminger femme, out of the shadows (Laura, Fallen Angel) and into Gainsborough canvases. Cut through men like a cannon ball or steal among them like a plague, says Balzac, the willful wench tries a combination on her way to the top. "She's in love with her own ambitions. I'm only part of them." Burnished candlelight and moonlight reflections and a roaring fire when needed, Preminger's mobile medium-shots accommodate every painterly hue. (The duel is suffused with Atget mist, and subsequently studied by Kubrick.) Tavern matriarch (Anne Revere) and murderous nurse (Margaret Wycherly) provide parallel glimpses of ruthless feminine enterprise, Sanders meanwhile impeccably pinpoints the melancholy behind the monarch's armor of sardonicism: "It is at best a fragile device, easily shattered, as you've shattered it tonight." The intriguing coda links New World and illegitimate child, the final gaze goes into Bonjour Tristesse. With Richard Greene, Jessica Tandy, Jane Ball, Robert Coote, Leo G. Carroll, Natalie Draper, Alma Kruger, Edmund Breon, Norma Varden, and Alan Napier.
--- Fernando F. Croce |