Ah the long-standing problem of film directors and their leading lady wives... David Lean filmed MADELEINE as a wedding present for Ann Todd after their marriage the previous year but one suspects that a bracelet might have been better; Lean thought it "the worst film I ever made".
Based on a notorious 1857 murder trial in Glasgow, Madeleine Smith was the daughter of a respectable middle-class family who had a secret two-year affair with a French man called Emile L'Angelier.
When Emile demanded marriage, Madeleine tried ending the affair and demanded the return of her love letters. A month later, Emile was dead from Arsenic poisoning... and Madeleine had recently purchased some from a chemist.
Madeleine walked free from her trial after the jury returned a verdict of Not Proven, her guilt or her innocence not conclusively proved.
Lean's film looks marvellous but is remote and uninvolving.
Shelf or charity shop? On the shelf only because it's part of a David Lean box-set. The film remains watchable due of the wonderful contributions of frequent Lean collaborators: Guy Green's cinematography, John Bryan's art direction and Margaret Furse's Victorian costumes. While the show-room dummy performances of Norman Wooland and Ivan Desny fade while you watch them, the real flaw in the film is the dead-eyed glacial performance of Ann Todd. An actress who projected the heat of a mortuary slab, she was simply too old for the role and one wonders how much better it could have been with a younger actress like Joan Greenwood, Jean Simmons, Jean Kent or even Deborah Kerr.
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