Film Review
Despite its contemporary setting and dabbling in psychoanalytics,
The Seventh Veil looks very much
as if it belongs to the same stable as Gainsborough's period
melodramas, particularly as it features James Mason yet again playing
the controlling brute with sadistic tendencies - the role he had played
so brilliantly in Leslie Arliss's
The
Man in Grey (1943) and Anthony Asquith's
Fanny by Gaslight (1944).
Whilst it is heavily imbued with the brooding Gothic atmosphere of
Gainsborough's lavish costume dramas and offers a familiar tale of
female domination by an unsavoury rogue,
The Seventh Veil was actual
produced by a small independent film company run by Sydney Box.
The film was made on a modest budget of £90,000 but it raked in
over two million pounds at the box office, making it one of the most
successful films ever to come out of a British film studio.
The film's success led to a stage version in London, with Ann Todd and
Herbert Lom reprising their roles. It also garnered an Oscar for
its screenplay and was entered in the 1946 Cannes Film Festival.
Part of the reason for the success of
The
Seventh Veil was that it latched onto a widespread popular
interest in Freud's psychoanalytical theories, something that resulted
in a prominent sub-genre of film noir melodrama in the late
1940s. Hot on the heels of this film came Alfred Hitchcock's
Spellbound
(1945), which set the psychobabble bandwagon rolling, with directors
such as Robert Siodmak (
The Dark Mirror), Rudolph
Maté' (
The Dark Past) and Fritz Lang (
Secret Beyond the Door) all
keen to get in on the act. In common with most of these films,
the supposed science underpinning
The
Seventh Veil is unlikely to stand up to scrutiny today but it is
sufficiently plausible to the layman to hold together the slightly
fanciful plot. The idea that the mind has seven veils, behind
which we conceal our true identity (in the way that Salome once
concealed her beauty), is certainly an intriguing one, and one of the
film's shortcomings is that it perhaps doesn't explore this concept as
fully as it might.
A more obvious failing is apparent in the first third of the film,
where Ann Todd appears somewhat
ridiculous playing a schoolgirl in her mid-teens (at the time the actress was
in fact 36). Todd comes into her own later on in the film, but
you wonder why a younger actress wasn't cast to play her character, at
least in the film's early scenes. On the other hand, there's
probably no other actor in the whole of time and space better suited
than James Mason for the part of Todd's Svengali-like, woman hating
second cousin. Less whip-crackingly dastardly than he was in his
films for Gainsborough, Mason still has an aura of quiet menace about
him, along with a tragic Byronic quality that makes him less a villain
and more an object of sympathy - at least until he reverts to form and
starts hitting people with his walking stick.
Herbert Lom is just as sinister on the surface (how could he not, with
his pronounced Slavic accent, penetrating gaze and severe looks?), but
there is also a warmth and humanity beneath the cold exterior that
makes his Dr Larsen a curiously ambiguous character - a far cry from
Lom's best known screen creation, Inspector Dreyfus in the
Pink Panther films. More
than anything, it is the unsettling ambiguity of Mason and Lom's
portrayals and the way their characters accidently mirror one another
that makes
The Seventh Veil such
a memorably dark film - that and the way that music is used throughout
to express the protagonists' inner turmoil as, metaphorically speaking,
they dance the dance of the seven veils and discover who they
are. The plot may be a little hard to swallow (the ending takes
melodrama to new heights of absurdity)
and Compton Bennett's direction lacks the inspired touch, but none
of this is enough to prevent
The Seventh Veil
from being one of the more enjoyable examples of British film noir.
© James Travers 2015
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
After Francesca Cunningham, a world class pianist, has attempted
suicide, an eminent psychiatrist, Dr Larsen, subjects her to a form of
hypnotic treatment to uncover the reasons for her self-destructive
tendencies. Francesca is taken back to her adolescence when,
after the death of her parents, she found herself in the care of a
reclusive older cousin, Nicholas. Since his mother abandoned him
as a child, Nicholas has grown into a bitter man who shuns the society
of women, but he soon develops a protective interest in Francesca and
encourages her to pursue a career as a pianist. Whilst studying
at the Royal College of Music, Francesca falls in love with an American
band musician named Peter, but when she asks Nicholas to grant his
consent to their marriage he refuses to give it. Instead, he
whisks her off to Paris to continue her education. Some years
later, after their return to London, Nicholas commissions the artist
Maxwell Leyden to paint a portrait of his ward. Nicholas reacts
badly to the news that Francesa and Leyden are in love, but as the
couple elope they are involved a car accident which leaves Francesa
convinced that her music career is over. As Dr Larsen encourages
Francesa to shed the seventh and final veil screening her innermost
thoughts, the pianist's future happiness hangs in the
balance...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.