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… Continue reading
Game of Consequences 