Unveiling the Mind

A beautiful young woman stops speaking and attempts suicide and a team of handsome men try to put her back together again in 1945's The Seventh Veil. The sexualisation of a woman's psyche isn't even really subtext--the title refers to a statement by Herbert Lom's psychiatrist character who compares his therapeutic hypnosis, stripping away a patient's layers of psychological insulation, to Salome dancing the Seven Veils. The last veil, he suggests, is the one human beings almost never, ever allow to be removed. From this prologue, the viewer is compelled to watch the film with rapt attention so the sexual discourse becomes intriguing and nuanced.

Ann Todd plays Francesca Cunningham in every scene in the film, from age 14 to to 26. She's a talented actress but, at 28, convincingly portraying 14 is a lot to ask. Still, her first meeting with her new guardian, following the death of her parents, is plenty provoking.

James Mason stars as her "uncle" Nicholas--in fact her second cousin. He has a cat in his lap when she meets him--she tells him she's afraid of cats but he invites her to "stroke it." You don't need to be Freud to read into that.

But despite the obsessively grooming relationship Nicholas develops with Francesca as he teaches discipline to go along with her natural talent at the piano, mainly things remain chaste. Her first love is another musician, the rather uninspiring American Peter (Hugh McDermott). In fact, it's conspicuous how much better looking Nicholas is than any of the other men in the film with the possible exception of Herbert Lom. Lom and Mason attempting to penetrate her veil, as it were, takes the form of finding the root of her anxiety about her hands which inhibits her ability to play piano. This puts one in mind of Marnie but The Seventh Veil was more of a piece with two great movies from the 1940s about men moulding women as musical performers, Citizen Kane and The Red Shoes. The Seventh Veil never reaches such heights and is a comparatively traditional melodrama with roots in Jane Eyre and Pamela. Still, the tension between sexual chemistry and a master/pupil relationship is exciting and it's hard to say no to James Mason with a cat.

The Seventh Veil is available on The Criterion Channel.

Arsenic on Her Hands

In 1857 Glasgow, a man was murdered by arsenic which led to the sensationalised trial of Madeleine Smith, his lover. Her trial concluded with the uniquely Scottish verdict "not proven", a conclusion the viewer may also reach from 1950's Madeleine, an adaptation of the story by director David Lean. Drenched in black shadows and shining surfaces, this fascinating film is more interested in the psychology of its central character than on whether or not she committed the crime.

Lean's wife at the time, Ann Todd, plays Madeleine, a young, unmarried woman of a wealthy, prestigious family. The film begins with her, her sisters, and her parents moving into an expensive terraced house in Glasgow and Madeleine claims a bedroom for herself and her youngest sister below street level. We soon see why as this enables her to make easy, clandestine meetings with her lover, a Frenchman named Emile L'Angelier (Ivan Desny).

She carries on with this affair even as her strict, class conscious father (Leslie Banks) arranges a suitable match for her with a kind gentleman named William (Norman Wooland). Madeleine promises Emile she will tell her father about him and marry him but for now she stalls, asking the amiable William not to tell her father that he had proposed marriage to her so that she wouldn't have to report that she'd turned the offer down.

Finally, at one late night meeting, Emile decides to force the issue and demands that Madeleine tell her father about him. This becomes the best scene in the film as Madeleine agrees and then Todd brings a series of changing expressions to her face that clearly show just how hard consciousness of what that means hits her for the first time. We see in her startled, and startling, reaction just how impossible it seems to her that the world where her father exists could ever connect with the one where Emile exists.

Lean had made it clear that Emile and Madeleine had a physical relationship. Earlier, alone on a hillside, the two overhear a country dance. Madeleine impulsively starts to dance and urges Emile to join her but he only stiffly participates, not knowing how to dance to the bagpipes. But she lies down anyway and waits for him--a cut to the lusty dancers indoors followed by a shot of Emile retrieving her forgotten shawl clearly enough communicates what had occurred in the interval. But it also shows that Madeleine's physical attraction to Emile is given priority over the lack of cultural and temperamental familiarity. It's sex she wants from him.

It's a relationship she'd entered instinctively when the opportunity arose and only too late does she consciously process the ramifications. And of course it turns out Emile won't accept elopement. He may really have affection for Madeleine but his own top priority is and always was her father's money and he's willing to use her letters as blackmail to get his way.

Lean cleverly avoids making it clear whether Madeleine deliberately poisons him or if some manner of accident occurs with arsenic in the kitchen. He does this without ever stepping away from her point of view so it's possible for the viewer to watch the film with either interpretation. Andre Morell appears as her defence council and makes plenty of very stirring and reasonable arguments as to why it couldn't be her. If she didn't want the letters found, surely she wouldn't have killed him without retrieving them--the timeline of her purchase of arsenic and his poisoning don't match up--the autopsy revealed the arsenic wasn't of the particular kind Madeleine was on record as purchasing for, she says, cosmetic use, believing arsenic to be good for her skin. But on the other hand, if she didn't kill him, who did?

But the film appropriately fixates more on the relationships that put Madeleine in this position. Murder obviously wasn't a useful solution but she was clearly in a bad, unfair situation. One might ask if the solution would be for a society to be more open about casual sex or if it would be healthier for people to be allowed to carry on private dalliances without fearing risk of exposure. Madeleine is available on The Criterion Channel.