the audience applauded

One of my all time favorites.

A Masterpiece!

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Inexplicably, there are some reviews of this film that are less than enthusiastic. However, if you are a real movie watcher, an appreciator of good old movies, you will find this an excellent, engrossing, well made film. A young, wealthy beautiful girl gets involved with a poor handsome caddish Frenchman. She has a very strict Victorian father who shapes her character in many ways. The attention to details in the film by the Director are excellent, especially the dancing scene that flashes to the villagers dancing- films are not made like this anymore. The Director, David Lean, was married to the lead actress in the film, Ann Todd, and you can tell that this film was made with great care. Some people say that Ann's performance was cold, yet I feel she was true to character, and that she portrayed her personality due to youth and upbringing very well. The costuming is also so stunning that it too adds to the film. As far as I am concerned this film is right up there, near to the level of the Heiress and other great films.

It's 1857 in Glasgow. The city we see on the screen, actually a series of sets, is eerie and a little ominous. It's often night. The streets are cobblestones glistening with recent rain. Gusts of wind scatter the fallen leaves about. The stone buildings seem abrasive. Dark shadows fill the many alleys. It's one of those cities in which anything can happen.There's something strange about the residents too, beginning with the fact that they're called Glaswegians. Ann Todd plays the real-life Madeleine Smith who had a French fiancé, tired of him when she met a new man, who all unwittingly became her second fiancé. Todd wants to marry Number Two, Norman Wooland, but this is a high-class affair and one naturally wants to avoid the kind of scandal that would interfere with one's being invited to the most fashionable soirées.Todd's problem is that fiancé Number One, Ivan Desny, a lively Frenchman, is in possession of a number of love letters from Todd that, by the standards of the early Victorians, were pretty lurid, containing phrases such as "my dearest" and "my bosom heaves with impatience" and certain ribald jokes usually deleted from the diary of Samuel Pepys. (I just made that stuff up, but the letters WERE incriminating.) Todd must get those letters back but Desny seems to be ignoring her importunings. So one day he turns up dead of arsenic poisoning. Todd, who has recently purchased some of the stuff, is taken to trial for the murder. Well, she's not Jack the Ripper but evidently this was a cause celebre at the time.I'd never heard of the movie and I tuned in late, only in time for Desny's death and the trial that followed. But it took only a few minutes to realize that whoever had directed it was showing a good deal of skill in making a movie. Not just those glistening cobblestones but scenes like the prisoner emerging from a trap door just in front of the crowded benches. The end credits revealed David Lean as the director, of course.I was never a big fan of Ann Todd. She's not a poor actress but rarely seems to have made a film worth remembering. The rest of the cast is superb, including Barry Jones as the insinuating, wheedling prosecutor, and Andre Morell as the defense attorney, more forceful than we're used to seeing him. Jean Cadell as the landlady looks flinty and unyielding but overcomes her outward appearance and acts the concerned citizen. And the script is intelligent and dignified. The dialog is of the period -- "I waited, but you came not." But Brits always handle this slightly stylized and elegant speech very well. Americans do it too, but they seem to be working harder at it.

It is ironic that this movie is based on real events and the names have not been changed yet perversely - especially for the time - director Lean declines to show how the two lovers from such disparate backgrounds ever got together in the first place. Instead, we are presented with a fait accompli - they are an item end of story. This really isn't good enough more so since Lean does go out of his way to portray Mr Smith as a martinet in the Moulton Barratt mould and it's is almost impossible to believe that Madeleine would have had sufficient freedom to become acquainted with her low-born French lover. Yet because it is a true story they clearly did meet and fall in love in greatest secrecy and it is surely not asking too much to let us in on the facts. The first half is pure Washington Square with a plain but wealthy girl being seduced by a good-looking pauper intent on social climbing but then it becomes something else entirely once arsenic rears its ugly head. Credibility is strained again when the friend who shares a room in the rat-hole in which the lover lives informs Mr Smith that he is attached to the French Consul. Of course you are, Froggy, all Consul employees live in rat-holes, natch. There's even a nod to a previous Todd box-office hit when her lover - who always carries a cane - asks her to play the piano for him, stopping short of adding if you won't play for me you'll play for no one. The direction is competent but no better than ho hum and that goes for the acting as well.

Excellent and unjustly overlooked David Lean film starring his then-wife Ann Todd, "Madeleine" is terrific drama, and perhaps one of Lean's best-directed films. Todd is the young Glasgow beauty Madeleine Smith, brought to trial in 1857, accused of murdering her lover by lacing his cocoa with arsenic. In sensational scenes, Madeleine was allowed to walk free, proved neither guilty or innocent through a lack of evidence. Lean takes an interesting approach with his subject matter here. The casting of Ann Todd, a blonde, glacial and enigmatic presence serves to be the director's strong point, as the ambiguity of Madeleine Smith's motivations are increased.Cinematographer Guy Green worked with Lean on the two Dickens adaptations before this film, and he once again shows absolute mastery of black-and-white images in this film. There are many strikingly composed shots in this film, not least the scenes between Todd and her lover, played by Ivan Desny. Madeleine hands him his cup of cocoa, and the shot is framed so the cup is in the foreground, alerting the viewer's attention and questioning Madeleine's motives as she focuses on the drink. At once we suspect her, knowing she has bought and used arsenic, but then doubt creeps back into our mind. Why would she let the young shop clerk and her maid both witness her buying arsenic, when it would have been much more clever of the woman to procure the poison by less public means? Another striking scene has Madeleine's tryst with her lover played out in the dark of night as she removes her shoes and dances to a Scottish song playing in the distance. At once Madeleine is free of the ties that bind her in the staid Victorian England, and her joyful, seductive dancing is inter-cut with rollicking, very physical scenes at the dance. Soon Madeleine is on the ground, losing her shawl. We fade to black, and Lean has very implicitly informed us about the nature of their relations.The acting is generally very good, with the leading players adding authenticity to their roles. Norman Wooland plays the wealthy, upstanding young man who courts Todd while she is still carrying on an affair with Desny. Elizabeth Sellars is also memorable as Todd's maid.Most historians believe the woman was guilty of the crime, as she certainly was in possession of arsenic in the weeks leading up to her lover's death, but Lean chooses to direct in a detached manner, and by the film's end we are still pondering "Did she or didn't she?". Todd gives a curious half-smile to the camera in the final close-up shot. Is it a smile of a woman who has survived a terrible ordeal, or the smile of a murderer?