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The marital state, as it were, from the vantage point of the lady in the clouds. Eliot's "flame of incandescent terror" not quite extinguished, the blizzard of balloons and streamers at the New Year's Eve party enhances the joke on old acquaintances unforgotten. (The husband contemplates the revelers "as if they were suspended by invisible wires," unaware of the puppet show he's himself part of.) The Londoner on holiday (Ann Todd), the banker she's married (Claude Rains), the biology professor from her past (Trevor Howard). Security and abandon, different offers from different men. "We're human beings, not joint stock companies!" The model is Daisy Kenyon rather than Brief Encounter and, like Preminger, David Lean is on everybody's side. The romantic image, jabbed by fast cuts and noir shadows in a sustained impressionism. Theater tickets dilate in the cuckold's mind, lights from the unseen stage flash on his face upon discovery of vacant seats, the playbill on a desk anchors his surprise for the clandestine couple. "Financial considerations" misheard as "irrational considerations" during dictation, cf. Suspicion. the distant view through a pair of binoculars that yields to the anxious secretary in close-up. The cable car carrying wife and lover to the Swiss Alps is gradually surrounded by spectral mist, the gelid peak reappears in Russell's Women in Love. "A sort of romantic hysteria. Well, perhaps not romantic, but a hysteria anyway." The divorce petition is a most fleet demon, curving electric rails come to embody the heroine's anguished psyche in the underground train tunnel. (A sign reading "Way Out" engulfs half the screen during her woozy meander, a poster reading "Keep Smiling" hangs above the reconciliation.) "Silly, the things we do..." A work of major importance to Pinter, Old Times and Betrayal in particular. With Betty Ann Davies, Isabel Dean, and Wilfrid Hyde-White. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |