Verdict: not proven

Prisoners of love in "Madeleine"

Let me start with a confession. Although I was a tuition-paying student of film in college, and I remain a zealous connoisseur of filmmakers from Griffith to Greengrass, I have never seen Lawrence of Arabia. That lapse has always been rather shameful to me– until recently. I have now seen most of David Lean’s other movies. He directed only 18 films from In Which We Serve (1942) to A Passage to India (1984), but I’ve also seen quite a few of the 27 he edited. More than most directors, Lean’s skills fully reveal themselves only after multiple viewings, and I’ve now seen Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Doctor Zhivago and This Happy Breed several times each. Yesterday, I added Madeleine to that list, and as a result I am now officially in awe of Mr. Lean, and thrilled that Lawrence of Arabia, his acknowledged masterpiece,  lies in my future.

Dad gets the bad news

In  Madeleine, which is based on a true story, Lean takes full advantage of a peculiar tenet of Scots jurisprudence, the so-called third verdict: not proven, which Sir Walter Scott called “the bastard verdict.” The film puts the viewer in the place of a juror, but so artfully that we’re not conscious of sitting in judgment. Very little of the movie takes place in a courtroom. Set in the 1850s, it begins in a posh square in Glasgow, where the Smith family is house-shopping. All the Smiths but one go first to examine the drawing room; 20-year-old Madeleine, however, spots a staircase that leads down to a private apartment, complete with a bedroom and a door to the street. She encourages her parents to take the house, they do so, and the next thing we know, Madeleine is trysting with her lover, a Frenchman (Ivan Desny) whom her domineering father (Leslie Banks) would never approve of.

Madeleine is played by Ann Todd, who was Jane Seymour to director David Lean’s Henry VIII, by which I mean she was the third of his six wives. Todd was also a skilled film actress, a woman who could convey a great deal with almost no change of affect. Indeed, her work here reminded me of Helen Mirren’s masterfully understated, Oscar-winning performance in The Queen, another role that is a study in secretiveness.

In addition to David Lean’s obvious skill at lighting and framing scenes for emotional impact, skills which are evident in the few stills I’ve posted, several elements in Madeleine can be held responsible for my belated infatuation with Mr. Lean…

Poisonous passion

The first was his presentation of Madeleine’s love affair. Reflecting the mores of the 1850s, the affair is suggested more than displayed– although Ann Todd kisses her lover with enough eagerness and hunger to clearly convey that this is woman who knows what she wants, and what she wants includes sex. Emile and Madeleine consummate their love one evening on a hillside above a town where music is playing and folks are dancing Scottish reels. Madeline joyfully dances a few steps, Emile joins in, she falls, he looks down at her, she looks up at him, and the next thing we know they’re referring to themselves as man and wife. The Scottish reel, then, is inextricably connected to coitus, and the next time we see and hear it, Emile is watching Madeleine dance with another man– Mr. Minnoch, the gracious, patiently enamored man her father approves of (and, by the way, so does Madeleine, and so did I). The camera begins on the dance floor, where Madeleine has just accepted Minnoch’s proposal. The next shot is in the gallery, where Emile watches, and because of their hillside reel, it is quite as if he’s caught them in flagrante delicto.

Ivan Desny as Emile

Ivan Desny had a huge film career, and he is marvelous as Emile. (He looks more than a little like a young Orson Welles.) The first time I saw Madeleine, I perceived Emile as a male gold-digger, and on paper he could be reduced to that. But during this viewing, it seemed to me that Emile was genuinely in love with Madeleine for a host of reasons– her wilfulness, her sexual appetite, her beauty, her devotion to him. He is all but penniless, and while she claims not to care, and even asks him to run away with her, he plainly points out that it would be better to marry into her wealth than into his poverty, and he asks her, also plainly, if she is ashamed of him. She claims not, yet refuses to introduce him to her family. Given Madeleine’s obvious vanity and the fact that, though she may fear her father, she has strong filial and familial ties, Emile’s attitude hardly seems rapacious. He is pragmatic, and prudent, and ultimately I could not help but be impressed by his pride. He calmly but firmly insisted that she introduce him to her father, so that he could call upon her at the front door, in daylight, without shame. She promises, then refuses, and ultimately rejects him for a safer man.

Finally, of course, it is Emile’s death by poisoning that forces the audience to become jurors. There is evidence that Madeleine is guilty– she bought arsenic, she had motive, she had opportunity, but all those factors are compromised– and ultimately, David Lean corners the audience into wondering if Madeleine did indeed murder Emile. The “bastard” verdict, not proven, forces us to continue to wonder, as the rest of the world has and still does about the real Madeleine Smith, which of the two lovers was the real bastard.