Movies

The British director Muriel Box recently came to my attention via her film Simon and Laura (1955), a light drama/heavy comedy about a theatrical couple forced to conceal their failure in marriage when they take the only work they can get - playing themselves on a daily television show. I was more interested in the BBC studio scenes than the story or characters, as they are the sort of charmingly hateful people I prefer to see cruelly skewered and brought low, (like Alan Bates in Butley), not glamourized and reconciled as it appeared was happening here, so I quit about halfway through. The production itself had many superior qualities so when I had a chance to see Box's 1957 The Passionate Stranger, a.k.a. Novel Affair, I made it a Family Movie Night feature. It is the story of a writer (Margaret Leighton) who uses the people around her as inspiration for her newest novel, with alarming consequences when her Italian chauffeur reads the manuscript and takes it rather too seriously. It's not a great movie - Donna and I both felt it lost a lot of pep midway and wound down a bit uneventfully, but it was a really good try which had a number of interesting features. I was especially impressed with the "gimmick" of the film, with the "reality" framing sequence being in monochrome and the extended fantasy, when the chauffeur is reading the manuscript, filmed in color. The entire fantasy sequence, which comprises half the film, was laughably melodramatic and intentionally so, aided to a great degree by the excessive gowns by Norman Hartnell with improbably vast stiff shawl collars and iconically '50s bell-shaped skirts and floral prints. Also deserving of recognition was the performance of Patricia Dainton as the maid; in the fantasy harsh, sharp-edged and painted; in the reality sweet, fragile and delicately appealing, by far the most sympathetic character in the film. This seems to me to point up the slightly unbalanced feel of the story. I also felt that in the end certain sequences needed for dramatic balance never materialized or took place off-camera. For overall quality I rate The Passionate Stranger 7/10, good but not great, and am looking out for more of Muriel Box. I thank you.