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.