Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945)

Madonna of the Seven Moons is a 1945 British melodrama  from Gainsborough Pictures, but melodrama is hardly an adequate word to describe this truly bizarre film. This is beyond mere melodrama.

The story begins in 1919. Maddalena (Phyllis Calvert), a young convent girl in Florence, is raped. She seems to to recover well enough from the experience and her father arranges a marriage for her. Her husband is Guiseppe (John Stuart), a very kindly Italian nobleman. The marriage is a great success. A couple of decades later their daughter Angela (Patricia Roc) who has been at school in England travels across Europe to rejoin her parents. Angela is a very modern girl. She thinks nothing of traveling alone across Europe with a young man. Maddalena, who is pious and conservative, is deeply shocked.

Maddalena herself is not however all that she seems to be. She has a secret and it’s far more shocking than anything Angela could dream up. Maddalena is two women, each unaware of the other ’s existence. The movie amusingly assures at the beginning that this stuff really happens! Of course psychiatry in the 1930s was almost as primitive as it is today so audiences might well have bought the story.

Phyllis Calvert certainly does her best to sell the story. It’s a very challenging double role and she manages to not only behave but also to look like two different women.

Two different women means two different men and the two men in Maddalena’s life are definitely poles apart. Guiseppe is kindly, civilised and urbane. Nino (Stewart Granger) is a thief from the gutters of Florence. A handsome thief of course, but with a violent temper and insanely jealous and possessive. In fact the sort of charismatic adventurous rogue you expect in a melodrama.

How Maddalena combines two incompatible lives does stretch credibility but this is melodrama so you just have to go with it.

Matters come to a head when Maddalena does one of her regular disappearing acts but this time Angela is determined to unravel the mystery. In doing so she places herself in considerable danger, danger to which she is (with the over-confidence of youth) utterly oblivious.

It’s not only Maddalena’s happiness that is at stake. There are also her two men. Nino is a scoundrel but he’s crazy in love with her. There’s also Nino’s smooth and unscrupulous brother, Sandro (Peter Glenville) not to mention Angela’s young man (who’s actually a respectable and thoroughly nice young fellow). And there’s Nino’s other woman, who keeps his bed warm during Maddalena’s disappearances.

There’s some gloriously delicious psychobabble here. The story is ludicrous but it’s told with style and it’s sheer outrageousness wins us over. We believe because we want to believe because the idea is just so much fun.

Phyllis Calvert throws herself into her roles with enthusiasm, as the ultra-respectable Roman matron and as her alter-ego, the fiery and very passionate peasant girl.

If you can buy her performance there’s no reason not to buy Stewart Granger as the handsome and dangerous criminal Nino. James Mason was usually Gainsborough’s go-to guy for these roles but I guess they figured that he might have had trouble convincing as an Italian bravo. Stewart Granger has the dark good looks to just about get away with it.

Patricia Roc is enjoyable as the high-spirited Angela.

Of course Gainsborough’s melodramas were notorious for pushing the edge of the censorship envelope. This ones pushes it farther than most. There’s just no way of avoiding the fact that Maddalena is having a sexual relationship, and a rather steamy one, with Nino. And the movie doesn’t even try to pretend otherwise. It positively wallows in the sexual titillation of Maddalena’s adultery. There are also hints of white slavery (which seems to be Sandro’s plan for Angela), not to mention Patricia Roc swanning about in some breathtakingly revealing underwear (in the kind of totally gratuitous scene that only Gainsborough seemed to be able to get away with). And while the opening rape scene is mostly implied we’re not left in the slightest doubt as to what has happened.

There’s also some obvious gothic content. This is not a horror film but it will certainly appeal to gothic horror fans, and it’s actually stronger stuff than any British horror movie would go near until Hammer’s forays into the genre in the mid-50s. There’s also illicit and perverse sexual content here that would also have terrified most British film-makers of that era.

The nature of the story meant that the plot could only be resolved in one way and it’s a way that modern audiences will disapprove of, although in fact it works.

Madonna of the Seven Moons is available on Region 2 DVD in an excellent inexpensive edition. It’s also been released in Region 1 as part of Criterion’s overpriced Eclipse series, in a Gainsborough melodrama boxed set that includes The Man in Grey and The Wicked Lady (both truly wonderful melodramas as well).

Madonna of the Seven Moons is bizarre and over-the-top and outrageously excessive and it’s a delight from start to finish. This movie is pure sinful indulgence. Highly recommended.

Attempt to Kill (1961)

Attempt to Kill, dating from 1961, is another of the B-movies based on Edgar Wallace’s stories made on a kind of production line by Britain’s Merton Park Studios at the beginning of the 1960s. It was based on Wallace’s 1929 novel The Lone House Mystery. It’s a fairly routine murder mystery B-picture.

Someone is trying to kill middle-aged businessman Frank Weyman (Richard Pearson). Weyman is a ruthless business operator (having made a fortune out of selling war surplus goods) so he certainly has enemies. He also has a jealous and embittered wife who refuses to give him a divorce so he can marry his secretary Elisabeth Gray (Patricia Mort). 

The most likely suspect is Fraser (Denis Holmes) who had been Weyman’s personal assistant until he was fired a couple of days earlier. He was fired for taking too much interest in Miss Gray so he appears to have multiple motives but as Detective Inspector Minter (Derek Farr) soon discovers things are not quite that simple. Another complicating factor is that Weyman’s friend Gerry Hamilton (Tony Wright) is also rather interested in the popular Miss Gray.

Fraser seems to have been up to something illegal or at least unsavoury. There’s way too much money in his bank account for a man on his income. It’s also apparent that Fraser’s new employer Mr Elliott (J.G. Devlin) has good reason to dislike Weyman but Elliott is confined to a wheelchair which seems to disqualify him as a suspect. Murder does soon strike, but not in the way that might have been expected.

The plot isn’t overly brilliant but Richard Harris’s screenplay is serviceable enough.

These were low-budget movies but they were made by people who knew their business. These films were cheap but not shoddy. Director Royston Morley worked mainly in television, and 1950s live television is probably not a bad background if you’re going to make inexpensive B-features.

Attempt to Kill doesn’t have much action, apart from a reasonably effective set-piece involving a speedboat. 

The acting is quite solid. Derek Farr makes a fairly convincing policeman. J.G. Devlin is nicely irascible as Elliott. Patricia Mort is a little bland but quite adequate as Elisabeth Gray. Richard Pearson takes the acting honours as the short-tempered, somewhat unethical Weyman, merciless in business but romantically inadequate (and naïve) Weyman.

Edgar Wallace’s stories, and the movies based on them, were often delightfully outrageous but this is a rather straightforward detective tale.

With a running time just short of an hour and with little time wasted on unnecessary distractions there’s not much danger of boredom.

Attempt to Kill is among the seven movies included in Network’s Region 2 Edgar Wallace Mysteries: Volume 2 DVD set. The anamorphic transfer is excellent. There are two or more usually three films on each disc but since they’re very short movies that doesn’t involve any serious compromises with the quality of the transfers.

I’m quite fond of these Merton Park Wallace movies. They’re like cinematic comfort food.

Attempt to Kill is enjoyable for those occasions when you’re in the mood for harmless undemanding entertainment. Recommended.

The Long Memory (1953)

John Mills might not be the first name that springs to mind when someone mentions film noir but he made several interesting British noirs including, in 1953, The Long Memory.

When we first meet Phillip Davidson (Mills) he’s just been released from prison after serving a long sentence. He was innocent of the crime and he’s bitter and as we’ll soon find out he wants revenge. We then find out what actually happened in a flashback sequence. Davidson had been hoping to marry Fay Driver (Elizabeth Sellars). Her father, a grizzled and drunken old sea captain (actually the skipper of a broken-down old tub), is mixed up in some very shady activities with some very shady people. There is a confused confrontation and then a fire breaks out on board. A body is found and Davidson finds himself facing a murder charge. All the witnesses lie at the trial but there is one betrayal that is especially painful. Davidson is convicted. He escapes the hangman’s noose but he serves twelve years and that’s not an easy thing to forget or forgive.

Davidson wants to track down three people, the three people whose evidence sent him to prison. Finding two of them is easy enough but the question is what is he going to do once he finds them?

Superintendent Lowther has had a tail on Davidson from the moment he left prison. Lowther was the man who arrested Davidson but the police had no reason to think, at the time, that there were any doubts as to Davidson’s guilt. He is however concerned by a report from the prison governor. Lots of convicted criminals vow to get revenge on those they blame for putting them inside but it’s unusual for them to nurse a grudge for twelve years. Lowther believes it’s very possible that Davidson may really be intending to take his revenge. Lowther is a good cop and in this case he hopes to prevent a crime. There is another reason for the Superintendent’s concern. One of the three people Davidson is looking for is the Superintendent’s wife.

Also taking a keen interest in the case is a reporter named Craig (Geoffrey Keen). He knows that there could certainly be a story here. Craig is a good reporter but he has a conscience as well (I know such a thing is wildly implausible but it’s a case where you have to suspend your disbelief).

We can understand Davidson’s desire for vengeance but at the same time we know that this time he could destroy his life completely and he’s basically a good man and we don’t want that to happen. Especially when, quite by chance, he stumbles onto something that could make his life worth living.

Unfortunately he has set certain events in motion and now, even if he were to change his mind, he may not be able to stop those events from unfolding in a way that could bring ruin to both the guilty and the innocent.

Robert Hamer was a very fine and justly celebrated director who contrived to wreck his own career through his weakness for the bottle. He does a fine job here.

This was an A-picture so there was enough money for at least one action set-piece, and it’s a reasonably satisfying one.

This movie has plenty of noir credentials. There’s a plot that is a web of lies and betrayals, there’s plenty of moody cinematography and there’s a protagonist who is a decent man who has fallen into the noir abyss and given way to impulses that might well lead him to destruction. There’s a delightfully sinister villain. There’s a Femme Fatale and there’s a Good Girl character as well. The question is whether the Good Girl can save him by persuading him to accept her love.

Mills does the noir protagonist extremely well. Davidson is an embittered man driven by a slow cold anger but we do get glimpses of the basic decency underneath. He’s trying to be hard and merciless but he’s going against his own nature. Mills was always wonderful at playing very solid and very noble heroes but he had a surprising talent for much darker and more tortured characterisations, a talent that made him ideal for film noir.

Fay belongs to the Ambiguous Femme Fatale category. She’s not an evil spider woman but rather a woman who has been put in a difficult situation and has chosen the morally wrong course of action. She has certainly managed to ruin Davidson’s life just as completely as any spider woman.

Ilse is the Good Girl. She’s a kind of stray puppy who follows Davidson home, home being the burnt-out shell of the barge that was the scene of the fatal fight that landed him in prison. Davidson wants to kick her out because he’s trying to convince himself that all he now wants out of life is revenge but she’s such a sad pathetic puppy and she’s so obviously desperate for his love that it’s not easy to steel himself to be cruel to her. Norwegian actress Eva Bergh is able to make Ilse sweet without adding too much sentimentality.

The John Mills Centenary Collection II boxed set comprises seven movies and they’re a varied bunch, which is a reasonable reflection of the breadth of his talent. It includes a couple of noirish gems - Tiger Bay and The Vicious Circle. The Long Memory gets a pretty good transfer.

The Long Memory is a satisfying crime thriller. Purists may not accept it as full-blown noir but it has enough noir credentials to please most viewers and it’s very definitely entertaining. Highly recommended.

The Flesh is Weak (1957)

The Flesh is Weak is a 1957 British production which seems on the surface like it’s going to be a lurid expose of the prostitution racket in England. And it is quite daring by the standards of the time. It has perhaps some very slight claim to be a film noir, or at least a film likely to be of interest to noir fans due to its fairly gritty approach to its subject matter.

Marissa (Milly Vitale) is just the latest in a long line of innocent girls ensnared by vice racketeer Tony Giani (John Derek) and his brother Angelo (Martin Benson). Marissa has only been in London a few days when she is offered a job as a hostess in a club. One of the patrons starts to get a bit too sleazy with her and she is rescued just in time by a handsome white knight. He will take her away from such sordid surroundings. He offers her fun and romance. He’s a terribly nice guy and of course Marissa falls for him. There’s only one slight problem. They can’t get married until his divorce comes through.

Yes, it’s the oldest line in the book and Marissa falls for it. In fact her handsome and sensitive white knight is Tony Giani and he’s a pimp. He’s persuaded her to take the bait and now he’s reeling her in.

Lloyd Buxton (William Franklyn) has been taking a particular interest in the activities of the Giani brothers. He’s a journalist and he’s working on a book. He wants to uncover the truth behind the vice racket but to do that he has to persuade the girls to talk to him, and that is easier said than done. The girls know that talking to cops or reporters is something that is likely to be very bad for their health. 

There’s little the police can do, since it’s impossible to make any charges stick as long as the girls are unwilling to talk. It’s slightly unusual for a 1950s British crime movie to portray the police as completely impotent and not overly interested.

Tony Giani believes in taking his time before putting a girl to work. He spends weeks grooming them, sweet-talking them and making sure the fall in love with him, and then he uses some ingenious emotional manipulation to persuade them that they’re actually doing it for love. The idea is to get them to be entirely willing recruits to prostitution.

Tony’s grooming of Marissa occupies a very large chunk of the film and I must confess that I found that it stretched credibility a bit. No-one could possibly be as dumb as Marissa. No-one could be that innocent. I also found it a bit difficult to buy the idea of Marissa as a completely innocent victim. After all she believed that Tony was married but she was quite willing to start an affair with him (and the movie makes it very plain that they are sleeping together). So she was quite happy with the idea of stealing another woman’s husband, but then we’re supposed to believe she’s as pure as the driven snow. To my way of thinking this movie is a bit too determined to portray the girls as totally innocent victims, bearing no responsibility whatsoever for their own actions, to an extent that isn’t quite believable.

In other words it’s a bit like so many of those awful American social problem movies of the same era, presenting a simplistic good vs evil view and emotionally manipulating the viewer into accepting that simplistic view.

Lee Vance’s screenplay is somewhat plodding. Director Don Chaffey does his best but he is unable to inject any real suspense or sense of urgency into the proceedings. A major problem is that the characters we’re supposed to feel sympathy for are extremely annoying. Lloyd Buxton is a typical do-gooder. Yes he is doing the right thing but he’s terribly earnest and he’s a bit of a bore. Marissa is difficult to take seriously, for the reasons I alluded to above.

John Derek as Tony is the movie’s saving grace. He really is incredibly charming and incredibly sinister and slimy all at the same time. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable performance and although he’s the chief villain he’s a lot of fun. 

The other characters are all clichés. There’s Freda Jackson as Trixie, the whore with a heart of gold. There’s Angelo, a generic gangster figure. There’s Shirley Ann Field as Susan, another of the girls who is almost as unbelievably dumb as Marissa.

OK, maybe I’m a hard-hearted cynic, but I just didn’t buy the premise of this movie and (apart from Tony) I just didn’t buy the characters. I didn’t care what happened to Marissa because I didn’t believe in her.

This is a message movie and that’s always a red flag. It’s trying so hard to be hard-hitting and sensitive and non-sensationalistic. Actually if they’d made it as an out-and-out exploitation movie it would probably have had more impact. 

Although there’s no nudity or actual sex scenes the fact that it’s absolutely up-front about the fact that Giani’s girls are prostitutes gave it considerable shock value at the time and it was a major hit.

The Flesh is Weak has been released on an all-region DVD by Odeon Entertainment in the UK. It’s a pretty good transfer.

I was decidedly underwhelmed by The Flesh is Weak. I can’t really recommend this one.

The Man in Grey (1943)

The Man in Grey was the first of a series of wildly successful women’s melodramas made by Britain’s Gainsborough studio in the 1940s. These movies were quite unapologetically targeted at a female audience. They were costume pictures so as well as featuring gloriously overheated melodramatic plots, forbidden love and forbidden sex, jealousies, betrayals, sexy bad boys and sexy bad girls you also get some fairly lavish period sets and  gorgeous costumes. The Man in Grey makes no attempt to be art. It’s a steamy Regency romance and it was a massive box office hit in Britain.

There’s a framing story set in 1940s England which I personally thought was a bit unnecessary but it does add even more romance and that’s what this movie is all about. The actual story takes place in Regency England. A new pupil arrives at an exclusive girls’ school. The other girls are all from rich families but Hesther Shaw (Margaret Lockwood) is a penniless orphan who has only been accepted because the headmistress owed her mother a favour. Hesther is very aware of her poverty. She is proud and resentful. She also has some definite long term plans to escape from poverty.

An unlikely friendship develops between Hesther and Clarissa Marr (Phyllis Calvert). Clarissa is Hesther’s opposite in every way. Hesther is a raven-haired beauty, Clarissa is blonde. Clarissa is all sweetness and light and assumes that everybody will like her. Hesther doesn’t care if people like her or not as long as they don’t interfere with her plans. This girlish friendship comes to an end when Hesther scandalises the school by eloping with a handsome but decidedly not respectable man.

The most eligible bachelor of the time is the young and handsome Lord Rohan (James Mason). Lord Rohan does not have a very good reputation. He devotes his life to pleasures of a frankly sensual nature and he is gloomy and moody. On the other hand he has a very distinguished title and oodles of money. In other words he’s the type of man to set female hearts a-flutter. Rohan has no interest in marriage but he does need to produce an heir so he will have to marry someone and Clarissa Marr seems as suitable as anyone. Clarissa, who is as naïve as she is sweet, accepts his proposal.

Not surprisingly Clarissa finds marriage to be very disagreeable. She seems to have found her wedding night to be particularly disagreeable. Rohan then explains the facts to her. All she has to do is to bear him a son. Once she does that they can live more or less separate lives, each free to have affairs as long as they are discreet. Lord Rohan has little time for conventional morality but he dreads scandal. The arrangement seems to suit Clarissa. And then she runs into her old school friend Hesther. She also runs into an old acquaintance of Hesther’s. Hesther and Rokeby (Stewart Granger) are in the theatre. Not a respectable profession in the early years of the 19th century and Hesther and Rokeby are traveling players, even less respectable. At the time actresses were assumed to be at lest part-time prostitutes and in fact it does seem quite likely to be true in Hesther’s case. Hesther is penniless and unhappy and Clarissa, who just wants everybody to be happy, comes up with a brilliant idea. She’ll persuade her husband to employ Hesther as their son’s governess. When she runs it by Lord Rohan he suggests something even more brilliant - Hesther can be employed as a companion for his wife.

Of course things are going to get very complicated. Rokeby, who is actually the owner of an estate in Jamaica that has been overrun by rebellious slaves, gets a job as librarian to Lord Rohan and soon he and Clarissa have fallen madly in love and are having an affair. Meanwhile Hesther has achieved her first major goal and has become Lord Rohan’s mistress. It sounds like a workable arrangement. Clarissa doesn’t care if her husband sleeps with other women - as long as he doesn’t want to sleep with her she’s happy. And Rohan has no objection at all to Clarissa sleeping with anyone she likes as long as she’s discreet.

Unfortunately not everybody is as discreet as they should be and Hesther is still plotting, still aiming at something more than just being a nobleman’s mistress. Hesther’s ambitions and Rokeby’s recklessness are going to bring everything crashing down.

As you may have gathered there’s a great deal of implied sex and most of it is very definitely illicit, if not perverse as well. And the film is pretty open about it all. It raised some eyebrows at the time and there are moments that still seem pretty damned steamy even today. Much of this is due to the casting. James Mason is of course perfectly suited to the role of the slightly dissipated, somewhat cruel and generally dangerous nobleman. Margaret Lockwood was one of the screen’s all-time great bad girls. She and Mason would team up again in The Wicked Lady and together they’re sexual dynamite. Phyllis Calvert has a difficult role since she has to make Clarissa convincingly naïve without making her seem stupid and she has to make her sweet and good-natured without being cloying. On the whole she manages it fairly well. Stewart Granger makes a wonderful reckless romantic hero (it turns out he’s really a nobleman as well but the slaves took over his estate in the West Indies).

The characterisations are not quite as unsubtle as you might expect. Lord Rohan is a bad boy but he’s not really a villain. Clarissa is sweet and wants to please people but she’s not especially virtuous. Rokeby is excitable but well-meaning. Hesther is definitely wicked, in fact very wicked indeed, but life has dealt her a bad hand so we can at least understand her motivations .

There’s a good deal of political incorrectness in this film. If it shocked audiences in the 40s it’s quite likely to shock modern audiences although for different reasons. 

Network’s Region 2 DVD release offers a fairly good transfer and, unusually for this company, some extras including a documentary on James Mason’s career. This movie has also been released in Region 1 in a boxed set in Criterion’s Eclipse series. 

This is a movie that packs as much twisted romance and illicit sexuality into its running time as it can. It’s a women’s picture, a chick flick if you like, so if you’re male you have been warned. It’s an out-and-out melodrama and it’s an unashamed bodice ripper but it’s a stylish and well-made example of both breeds and if that’s what you’re looking for then it delivers the goods. Highly recommended.