Lawrence of Arabia

It may be a surprise, but one of those movies that I never sat down to watch all in one go, largely because of the length, is Lawrence of Arabia. Partly for that reason and partly because of my reluctance to do posts on extremely well known movies, I've never done a full-length post on it here. But to rectify that, the last time it showed up on TCM, I recorded it in order to be able to watch it in advance of the next showing. That next showing is tomorrow, February 21, at 11:30 AM as part of a day devoted to epics.

Peter O'Toole stars as T.E. Lawrence, and as the movie opens, he's riding his motorcycle to his death in England in the mid-1930s. His was a well known name, so a lot of people gather for the funeral, and a couple, such as reporter Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy), basically intimate that Lawrence was an SOB, but our SOB. Since Lawrence is dead, we're obviously going to get a flashback to when he was alive.

The scene shifts to 1916/1917, which is smack dab in the middle of World War I. Britain is one of the Allies while the Ottoman Empire are one of the opposing Central Powers. The Ottomans are Turks, but a fair amount of the territory they govern is Arab, such as the Hejaz which is now a province on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) is one of the potentates who is leading an Arab revolt against the Turks, and the British realize supporting the Arabs is a good way to destabilize the Ottoman Empire. They've already got an advisor there in Col. Brighton (Anthony Quayle), but aren't certain of what the situation is really like, so they want to send a second man in Lawrence, an army lieutenant (ultimately promoted to colonel) who speaks Arabic and has good knowledge of the region, to get more information.

Lawrence is supposed to meet Faisal, but first meets Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), who will take Lawrence to where Faisal is. However, along the way, Ali and his men run into Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn), who is from a different tribe from Ali. Sadly, the two tribes have a blood feud that threatens to derail the whole uprising until Lawrence puts it to rest by carrying out an execution himself. Worse, he finds that he doesn't dislike killing people. In any case, the result of this is that many of the Arabs act like they've got a lot of respect for Lawrence.

Lawrence's plan is that the Arabs should attack the port city of Aqaba, now at the southern tip of Jordan. Of course, the port is well defended, but only from the sea, since on the other sides lies a desert that's thought to be impassable. Except that Lawrence figures they can cross it and surprise the Ottomans that way, which works. It brings Lawrence more glory, but to go any further he's going to have to get more help from the British back in Cairo.

The British seem none too pleased that Lawrence looks as though he's going native, as it were, and supporting the Arab desire for total independence which would clash with what the British and French have decided should be done with the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottomans. The Arabs, for their part, are looking to get to Damascus, while General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) of the British will be going to Jerusalem as that area even during the 1910s had a substantial Jewish population. (Not every Jew had left in the various diasporas, while Zionism had begun with some European Jews already moving to the region, which south of Beirut had a fairly sparse population.)

Lawrence keeps attacking, but there's some question of whether he's getting too big. Also, there's the question of whether the Arabs are going to be able to govern anything modern if they do take Damascus. The leaders of the revolt are tribal and suited to desert warfare, but Damascus is a fairly modern city. They could easily use western engineers, but that might keep them from being truly independent.

It's easy to see why Lawrence of Arabia won so many Oscars. The acting is quite good, as is the cinematography and other parts of the production design. Maurice Jarre's musical score is also memorable. However, I'd have to say that Lawrence of Arabia is another of those movies where, while it's very good, I'm not certain I agree with it ending up near the top on lists of all-time great movies. The movie runs over three and a half hours plus the intro/entr'acte/exit music; the print TCM ran is 227 minutes. And frankly, in the last hour or so the movie really loses steam. Some historians take serious issue with some of the ways history is presented here. Certain of the characters are composites (such as the diplomat played by Claude Rains), a movie which is often necessary when trying to distill a story like this down to a reasonable length, but apparently some of the timeline is wrong and the movie glosses over Lawrence's knowledge of the region before the war.

For some values of passion

Claude Rains will be TCM's star in Summer Under the Stars coming up in a few hours, and his day concludes with a movie I didn't know about until the last time it ran on TCM a few months back: The Passionate Friends. That airing comes up overnight tonight, or early tomorrow morning depending upon your point of view, at 4:00 AM.

Rains may technically be the star here, at least the male star, as the real leading character is played by Ann Todd. She plays Mary Justin, and as the movie opens it's some years after World War II and she's on her way to a well-deserved vacation at a resort on a lake in the Alps. (The Alps scenes were filmed in France, although the plot synopses have the action taking place in Switzerland.) While lying in bed at the resort waiting for her husband, she hears a voice that sounds very familiar, and she has a flashback....

At the start of 1939, Mary is married to Howard Justin (that's Claude Rains), who does some sort of banker's work which is soon going to take him to Germany and Italy to assess the situation in those two countries with the possibility of war on the horizon. But at a New Year's party, Mary runs into Steven Stratton (Trevor Howard), a science professor. It turns out that they had known each other in the past, before Mary married Howard, and that the relationship ended in a breakup that wasn't really a breakup, something shown in another flashback.

But in 1939 with Howard away on the Continent, Mary and Steven are able to see each other again and resume their relationship, at least until Howard returns. Howard is no dummy, and figures out that something is up, and when Mary and Steven return ostensibly from the theater, Howard knows this is a lie, and forces Mary and Steven to break up their relationship again. He's not going to grant Mary a divorce.

So as we go back to the present day, we learn that it's Steven who's wound up on vacation at the same resort as Mary, who is in a day or two going to be joined by Howard. Mary and Steven haven't seen each other for years, since Mary and Howard spent the war on government business in Washington. And it's just by pure dumb coincidence that the two wound up at the same hotel together. Still, not having met each other in years, they decide to spend the day on an excursion to one of those alpine peaks you can get to by cable car. They're safe, since Howard isn't supposed to show up until tomorrow.

Except, of course, that Howard is able to get an earlier plane, which enables him to get to the resort as Mary and Justin are coming back across the lake by water taxi. If Mary had been with any random stranger, it might not have been a big deal, but it's Steven, again, which really ticks off Howard.

I, and a lot of other viewers, couldn't help but think of Brief Encounter as I was watching The Passionate Friends, as both movies were directed by David Lean. I think I've mentioned before that I'm not the biggest fan of Brief Encounter mostly because I had difficulty sympathizing with the Celia Johnson character. By the same token, I found it hard to feel for Ann Todd's character. But worse is that The Passionate Friends feels like it has an even more muddled plot than Brief Encounter. The leads here all do fine acting jobs, but they're betrayed by that story structure.

Still, The Passionate Friends has that very British quality of seeming like a prestige film on a lower budget than what Hollywood would have done with the material. That, and the fact that I always think you should judge for yourself, are things that make The Passionate Friends worth watching and drawing your own conclusions.

India from a passage

I've mentioned quite a few times before in passing the "Blind Spot" blogathon, where the point is to select a dozen "essential" movies you haven't actually seen, and blog about them over the course of a year. I've never taken part it it, largely because I don't know what movies I'm going to be watching over the course of the following year, and whether movies that are one of my blind spots are going to show up on TV for me to watch. In any case, a movie that had been one of my "blind spots" was David Lean's A Passage to India, which TCM ran during 31 Days of Oscar and which I finally watched.

Judy Davis plays Adela Quested, a young woman in 1920s England. As the movie opens, she's booking passage to India, together with a much older traveling companion, Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft). Mrs. Moore has a son, Ronny, who's part of the British administration, and Adela is set to marry Ronny at some point in the future. Mrs. Moore books a round trip, but Adela only books one way, as she is uncertain when she's going to come back.

Adela and Mrs. Moore get to India, where they find that the British have mostly tried to bring a piece of Britain to India, living as rich feudal lords and using the local Indians as hired help. Some of the local Indians, however, are taking the opportunity to get into the good graces of the British colonial authority, from where they'll try to agitate for independence. One example is the widower Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee), whom we first see being very obsequious to a British school headmaster, Fielding (James Fox).

Fielding is a bit different from the other British in that, while he certainly hasn't gone native, seems to have more sympathy towards the Indians. And, of course, they certainly have legitimate grievances. Fielding even has a friend in the form of the guru/scholar Godbole (Alec Guinness), whose presence in the film seems to serve the purpose of being the detached person who can look at events from both sides and with the view of someone never directly involved.

It's through Fielding that Adela is introduced to Dr. Aziz, which Adela is happy for as she doesn't want to be part of an insular British community. Aziz, ever eager to do the needful and curry favor with the British, takes Adela and Mrs. Moore on a tourist excursion to some local caves.

But something happens in the caves, something that's never made quite clear. Adela seemingly gets separated from Aziz in the relatively dark cave, before running out of the cave, down the hill, and winding up terribly bloodied. But what actually happened? To save her honor, Adela says that Aziz attempted to rape her. (I think the plot would make a bit more sense if Adela had accused the local guide, who may or may not have met up with her again after being separated.) The rape trial becomes a sensation as the local Indians start showing their nascent political awakening. At the same time, however, they feel like they can't really get justice from British courts, who are always going to stand with one of their own.

A Passage to India is a visually beautiful movie, largely because director David Lean did a lot of location shooting and had access to very lovely places to film. The movie is also well acted, although 40 years on some people will argue whether Alec Guinness should have been playing a non-British character. The movie, however, runs at a very leisurely pace, lasting 163 minutes for what really isn't all that much story. Some people may find it a bit too slow.

Overall, however, it's easy to see why critics and the Oscars loved A Passage to India, ad why it generally gets positive reviews to this day. It's definitely worth a watch if you can block out the 160-plus minutes it lasts.

Teacher O'Zhivago

Robert Mitchum was TCM's Star of the Month in January, and one of his movies that I recorded not having seen it before was Ryan's Daughter. It's on TCM again during 31 Days of Oscar since it got multiple nominations. That airing comes up overnight tonight at 1:45 AM (or early tomorrow depending upon your perspective and time zone), so I made a point to watch in order to to a review in conjunction with the upcoming showing.

The movie starts off with a woman walking along a beach somewhere in the west of Ireland. That woman, Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles), is the daughter of the local publican, Tom Ryan (Leo McKern). At the pub, we learn that it's around 1917, which would be the later stages of World War I, but before American involvement really turned the tide of war. Also, 1917 was just after the Eastern Uprising in Ireland. Ireland was still a part of the United Kingdom at the time, but a lot of people on the island wanted independence from Britain, while UK soldiers are also stationed on the island.

Returning from a visit to London is the local teacher, Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum). The first thing he does is go to the cemetery to visit the grave of his dearly departed wife. It's been a couple of years since Charles became a widower and it might be time for him to start thinking about finding another wife. Meanwhile, Rosy wants any sort of romance, just so she can get the heck out of this dead-end of a village, and when she meets Charles, she allows herself to be swept off her feet, even though for him, it's more a matter of practicality. When Rosy discovers that marriage isn't all it's cracked up to be, it leaves her rather disillusioned.

There's still another main character who has yet to be introduced: Major Doryan (Christopher Jones). He's obviously in the British Army, and served with quite some distinction on the front over in France. However, his service resulted in several injuries. One is a leg injury that's left him with a limp. More seriously, however, is a case of shell shock, which is part of why he's being sent to a backwater like this. However, he's a soldier in a uniform, and that's enough for Rosy. As you can guess, the two begin an affair.

But Doryan is English and Rosy is Irish. And this village is one of those places where the locals largely support independence from Britain, so they've been working to try to make life difficult for the British troops stationed there. At the same time, support isn't unanimous as they've got an informant in their midst. So when they try to run munitions, the British are going to find out, which is going to lead to disastrous consequences.

And then Charles is going to figure out that Rosy has been having an affair with Doryan. That also is going to have terrible consequences. Not only is Charles going to be unhappy, but the locals come to the logical conclusion that perhaps Rosy was the one informing on them to Doryan. After all, she was sleeping with the guy.

Ryan's Daughter was panned by critics at the time of its release, and it's not hard to see why. The movie runs 200 minutes, and its an incredibly slow 200 minutes at that. It's more of an intimate story than an epic, which doesn't have to be a bad thing. But here, the movie kept reminding me of Doctor Zhivago, a movie of which I'm not a fan to say the least. Part of that is the direction by David Lean, and part is the overbearing score by Maurice Jarre, who collaborated on Doctor Zhivago. While Lean made some great movies, his direction here is plodding.

As I said, Ryan's Daughter got multiple Oscar nominations, and won two. One was for the cinematography, which is the high point of the movie, and certainly Oscar-worthy, although I haven't seen all of the nominated movies to compare. The other one was for John Mills as Best Supporting Actor. He plays a character who's half Barry Fitzgerald from The Quiet Man -- the Quirky Villager who helps move the plot along at a few key times. The other half, however, is Nick Cravat, a Mills' character is for no explicable reason a mute. Either way, the character is obnoxious.

So as you can tell, I didn't particularly care for Ryan's Daughter. But as always, judge for yourself.

10-20 years after Cavalcade

Noël Coward did a lot: acting, singing, and writing plays. Quite a few of his plays have been turned into movies; one that I hadn't seen until now is This Happy Breed.

Frank Gibbons (Robert Newton) is the patriarch of a middle-class British family with a wife Ethel (Celia Johnson) and three adolescent children -- at least, they're adolescents at the start of the movie. The movie begins in 1919, just after Frank has returned from fighting in the Great War, and he wants to start life anew, which is why he's taken a nicer townhouse in one of the leafier districts of London.

On arriving at the new house, Frank discovers that his next door neighbor is somebody he knew vaguely during the war, Bob Mitchell (Stanley Holloway). Bob has a son Billy (John Mills) who's going to become a sailor and who falls in love with the eldest Gibbons daughter Queenine (Kay Walsh) once she grows up, although she doesn't realize that Billy is right for her, probably because being married to a sailor isn't easy. Just ask Brandy in that old 1970s song.

Anyhow, after the brief introduction in 1919, the movie moves forward to various points over the next 20 years, many of which would be well-knowon to students of British history (and certainly British audiences of 1944 when the movie was released). There's things like the 1926 general strike; references to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin; and the death of King George V; although somewhat surprisingly, Edward VIII and his abdication wasn't a big deal.

There's also various cultural phenomena such as the radio and the advent of talking pictures, including a scene of a couple of characters watching The Broadway Melody which made me wonder who in Britain held the rights to the movie at the time and if there was an issue with that scene when the movie made it across the Atlantic. (IMDb says the movie didn't get released in the US until 1947, although I'd bet that has more to do with World War II and its aftermath than the presence of the clip from The Broadway Melody.)

Along the way, the family goes through various troubles, the two biggest being the death of the son in a car cash, and Queenie's affair with a married man, which causes Mom to disown her. Eventually, the movie makes its way to 1939 and the start of World War II, which seems a fitting place to conclude the movie.

As I was watching This Happy Breed, I couldn't help but think about the comments I made regarding First Lady a few weeks back. It's material that seems like it would play really well on the stage, especially with a large live audience. On the screen, however, it felt to me as though something was missing. On the other hand, the movie was made in Technicolor, which must have been a difficult feat in the UK at the height of the war. It's physically beautiful to look at.

On the whole, I'd give a positive recommendation to This Happy Breed, especially if you're an Anglophile. It's not quite as good as some of the other movies based on Noël Coward works, but it's definitely worth a watch.

Great Expectations (1946)

Some movies make doing a synopsis relatively easy, since they're based on famous people or famous works of literature. TCM did a spotlight on literary adaptations a few months back, and ran David Lean's version of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. It's going to be on again tomorrow afternoon at 2:00 PM as part of an afternoon of Lean's movies.

Pip (played by Anthony Wager as a child and John Mills as an adult) is an orphan who lives with his aunt and her husband, blacksmith Joe Gargery (Bernard Miles). While visiting his parent's grave, he's accosted by an escaping convict, Abel Magwitch (Finlay Currie). Some time later, Pip is paid by Miss Havisham (Martita Hunt) to be a play-date for her adopted daughter Estella (Jean Simmons as a child and Valerie Hobson as an adult).

Eventually Pip becomes old enough to become an apprentice. Havisham, who was stood up at the altar and hates all men as a result, sends Estella off to become a lady and treat men the way men treated Havisham. Pip has a mysterious benefactor who informs him, through solicitor Mr. Jaggers (Francis L. Sullivan), that he'll be receiving £250 a year, which is apparently a pretty nice sum back around 1830.

So Pip heads off to London where he first meets Herbert Pocket (Alec Guinness) before running into Estella again; she's making life hell for another man although she plans on hurting Pip too, given the chance. Abel Magwitch had been caught not long after first meeting Pip, and got sent to Australia, as convicts were at the time. He turned to sheep ranching and became wealthy enough to give Pip that endowment.

But, there's a lot more going on. Jaggers knows more than he's telling anybody, and there's the question of how anybody could have known that Magwitch was back in England. But everything ends up relatively well for Pip, after a lot of tribulation. This is, after all, based on a Dickens book, and there's a lot of pages for everybody.

Dickens' books may not be for everybody, since they tend towards the long -- after all, many of them were written as serializations and he needed to keep the number of installments high to make more money. But they also lend themself well to movie adaptations. David Lean did a good job with Great Expectations, at least as well as ould be expected for a 1940s British black and white movie. Everything does have a bit of a studio-bound look, and to be honest, Mills and Hobson are much too old to be playing Pip and Estella. Both were around 40 in real life playing characters in their early 20s.

But despite all of the technical flaws, they're easy enough to overlook, and Lean did well to distill Great Expectations down to its essence, not getting lost in any sub-plots. If you haven't seen it before, it's one you should definitely catch. There are, I think, some better British movies from the period, but as a literary adaptation Great Expectations is extremely accessible.

Oliver Twist (1948)

Tonight's lineup on TCM is a bunch of adaptations of the works of Dickens, which includes a chance to see MGM's 1938 version of A Christmas Carol at 8:00 PM, this being the Christmas season after all. But the movie I'd lik to mention is the 1948 British version of Oliver Twist, which comes on overnight at 2:15 AM, which is still late this evening if you're out on the west coast.

The movie starts off with a woman who's apparently heavily pregnant, but able to move surprisingly well for a pregnant woman. She shows up at a parish workhouse, which serves as an orphanage for all the lower-class children without parents, gives birth, and dies soon after, leaving behind the kid and a locket.

Fast forward nine years, and the kid, little Oliver Twist (John Howard Davies) is suffering in the orphanage under the cruel treatment of the administrator Bumble (Francis L. Sullivan), especially because Oliver is slightly more foolhardy enough to stand up for himself than all the other kids. One day the kids draw straws to see who's going to have to ask the adults for a second helping of gruel, and Oliver gets the short straw. For his impertinence, the administrators send Oliver to be apprenticed to an undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry

The undertaker isn't much better, and thanks to more bad treatment, Oliver eventually runs away, making his way to London, the great city of the day where there are a million people and nobody will ever be able to find him, not that he's got any marketable skills or anything like that. In London, he's espied by a teenaged urchin nicknamed the Artful Dodger (a young Anthony Newley), who is part of gang of criminal youths, mostly pickpockets, led by the adult Fagin (Alec Guinness). The Dodger takes Oliver in, and Fagin starts teaching Oliver the tricks of the trade.

In an attempted robbery gone wrong, Oliver is wrongly accused of trying to pick the pocket of wealthy Mr. Brownlow (Henry Stephenson), when he was just watching. So technically he's guilty of being an accomplice although there's no evidence of that. When a witness states he saw two other kids doing the actual deed, Oliver is released to the care of Brownlow, who turns out to be an incredibly nice guy.

Unfortunately, Oliver has a bit of a past, and not just being an orphan, thanks to that locket that would reveal a big secret. A guy named Monks (Ralph Truman) suspects something, and asks Fagin to get Oliver while he tries to get the locket. Fagin's men, in the form of Bill Sykes (Robert Newton) and his girlfriend Nancy (Kay Walsh) do kidnap Oliver.

There are more twists (no pun intended) and turns, of course, this being based on a Dickens novel, and Charles Dickens having written precious little that's actually short. (If memory serves, most of his novels were originally published as serializations, which would explain the length -- Dickens needed to keep writing more installments for the money!) But little Oliver winds up having a happy ending as you can probably guess.

There were a couple of things that really stuck out at me when watching this adaptation of Oliver Twist, directed by David Lean at the start of his career. One is that the production values seemed slighlty off, at least certainly nowhere near those of the Korda brothers or Powell and Pressburger. I'm not certain how much this has to do with the fact that there was still post-war rationing going on in the UK. But watching Oliver Twist felt more like watching an RKO movie than watching a glossy MGM literary adaptation. Not that this makes the movie bad; it just didn't seem to have that shine. I don't recall having that feeling while watching Lean's earlier Great Expectations (on at midnight), which I think came mostly from the same studio.

The other obvious thing was Fagin. Not only is Fagin supposed to be Jewish, he's a very obvious and negative stereotype, complete with the thoroughly unnatural hook nose. Guinness is so made up that this, along with the anti-Semitism, may be disconcerting to some viewers. Overall, though, this adaptation of Oliver Twist is definitely worth watching, especially since it doesn't have the cloying musical numbers of the 1960s musical. (There's a traditional song or two sung in a dive bar.)

This version of Oliver Twist has received a DVD release courtesy of the Criterion Collection, so it's a bit pricey.

Blithe Spirit

Another of the movies that I recorded months ago but is coming up on TCM soon is Blithe Spirit. The next airing is tomorrow afternoon at 4:45 PM.

Rex Harrison plays Charles Condomine, a successful writer living in one of those English country estates together with second wife Ruth (Constance Cummings), his first wife Elvira having died some years ago. One of the plot points in his next book involves a séance, so Charles decides that he's going to invite some friends over and bring in a local medium to hold a séance.

Of course, everybody knows that this sort of stuff is a giant scam, doesn't everybody? The Condomines invite a couple of friends, Dr. Bradman (Hugh Wakefield) and his wife (Joyce Carey), and get Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford) to do her thing as the medium.

They all get together, and as you can expect, nothing happens. Not long after the séance breaks up and Arcati and the Bradmans head home, there's a sudden, inexplicable rush of wind at the patio door.

Wouldn't you know it, but something did happen. (Obviously, something had to happen, or else there wouldn't be a movie. A green-hued woman enters the scene visible only to Charles, and it's obvious to the viewer that this must be a spirit of some sort. What's obvious to Charles is that this is the spirit of Elvira (Kay Hammond).

Elvira is decidedly unhappy, as she's seen Charles' second wife, and she thinks Ruth isn't right for Charles. Elvira is also unhappy about having been brought back from the dead, although she's not exactly alive either; just in some sort of limbo where she can interact with objects and even talk to Charles. So she talks to him, and anybody else who happens to be around for these conversations only hears Charles so they think something's seriously wrong.

Charles is eventually able to convince Ruth and Arcati that Elvira has come back; and Ruth wants Arcati to help send Elvira back to where she came from. But no matter what Arcati tries, it doesn't work, making everybody including Elvira a bit testy.

If that's not bad enough, there's a series of accidents involving Charles and some of the hired help. This give Ruth a frightening insight: Elvira has decided that she wants Charles for herself and not let Ruth have her anymore, and the only way to do this is to kill Charles so they'll both be in the afterlife together. At this point even more shocking turns of events take place.

Blithe Spirit is based on a play by Noël Coward, who according to IMDb provided the narration. I'm not as big a fan of Coward's comedies as people who are fans of the stage or people who are Anglophiles tend to be, so there are going to be people who like this more than I did.

Not that I disliked Blithe Spirit, however. I did have a few problems, mostly with Kay Hammond who seemed a bit too shrill. I've never seen the play, so I don't know if Elvira was supposed to be as irritating as she is in this movie adaptation. Technically, however, the movie is a treat. It was filmed in Technicolor which is quite vivid, and the special effects are very good too.

I had thought about doing a post on Blithe Spirit earlier, but I could have sworn that when I searched on the TCM Shop, they didn't have a DVD available. The opening of the print TCM showed, however, is the Criterion logo, so I looked there, and sure enough, they have a box set of David Lean directing Noël Coward in four movies. Three of them (Blithe Spirit, In Which We Serve at 11:30 AM, and Brief Encounter at 6:30 PM) are on tomorrow's schedule; the only one that isn't is This Happy Breed. Of course, being a Criterion release, it's quite pricey.

Apparently there's a new version of Blithe Spirit in the works, although the release date got pushed back by the coronavirus nonsense and it's not set to be released until sometime in 2021.

Madeleine

Some time back, I DVRed the 1950 British film Madeleine. It's going to be on TCM again at 6:00 AM tomorrow.

Ann Tood plays Madeleine Smith, the adult daughter in a family in Glasgow in the early part of the Victorian era. The family is getting a new house in a fashionable part of the city, and Madeleine decides that she likes the basement bedroom, for reasons we'll discover presently. One day, a man approaches, running his walking stick along the bars of the basement bedroom window, which is obviously a sign to Madeleine. He passes her a note, which reads, "10 o'clock".

The Smiths are entertaining Minnoch (Norman Wooland), a nice gentlemen who is rather older than Madeleine, except that this was an era when it was relatively common for young women to marry gentlemen quite a few years older. Obviously, it's Mr. Smith's (Leslie Banks) hopes that he can marry off Madeleine to Minnoch. Minnoch, for his part, eventually asks Mr. Smith if he can start seeing Madeleine. Dad, who is of rather stern Scottish stock, lets Madeleine know in no uncertain terms that she should agree to this, and is rather peeved that she doesn't seem to share Minnoch's interest in her.

That, of course, has to to with the note she got. At 10:00 PM on the night she gets it, she goes out of the basement door to see the man who delievered it, L'Anglier (Ivan Desny). She's in love with him, but he's not of the proper social class for Mr. Smith to approve, so she's been seeing him illicitly and sending love letters. L'Anglier follows the Smiths around so he can keep seeing Madeleine, and he gets Madeleine to imply that she'd be married to him by now if only Mr. Smith wouldn't approve.

Things change, however, when Madeleine learns during one of the meetings that L'Anglier really seems less interested in Madeleine herself and more in the family's money. She wants to break off the relationship, but she finds that it won't be so easy. L'Anglier has those love letters, and probably wouldn't be above trying to blackmail her and her family by letting her father know about those love letters and the informal engagement.

Madeleine responds by buying arsenic, which she claims is part of a beauty treatment (apparently, there really were some bizarre theories about arsenic back in the 1850s). L'Anglier falls ill and dies shortly after, and when it's determined at autopsy that he died of arsenic poisoning, it's not very difficult for the police to put two and two together and determine that Madeleine must have poisoned him.

So she's put on trial in what is the trial of the era. (The movie is based on a real case, as the narrator mentions at the beginning of the movie.) The prosecution has a whole lot of evidence, in the form of the letters, Madeleine's arsenic, and the motive. But the defense also has very good evidence. Apparently L'Anglier had had a similar illness to what ultimately killed him at a time that categorically excludes Madeleine's involvement; the arsenic that killed L'Anglier appears to be a different color than what Madeleine bought; and L'Anglier was also known to take all sorts of wacky quack medicines, some of which contained arsenic.

David Lean directed early in his career, and the result is a very good movie. The performances are good, but the cinematography is even better. The movie is also helped by being based on a true story in which the truth may sometimes be stranger than fiction.

Unfortunately, the movie seems to be out of print on DVD. The print TCM ran has a Criterion title animation before the movie, but Criterion's site doesn't list the movie as being available for purchase, or even as being out of print. So you're going to have to watch the rare TCM showing.