A WOMAN'S VENGEANCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 473, 16 July 1948, Page 28

A WOMAN'S VENGEANCE

(Universal-international) O know the story on which a film is based is in some ways a dubious advantage. One expects the action to develop thus and thus, and when the pattern of events fails to conform to the original specifications it is fatally eesy (however much the changes may be justified by the exigencies of a new medium) to damn them as so many lapses from grace and truth. But if such prior knowledge does sometimes lead one astray in matters of superficial detail it is generally a sound guide to the ultimate worth of a film. In the present instance it also provides illuminating evidence of the extent to which en author of distinction has to abate his own critica! standards in order to accommodate them to the artificialities of the screen ethic. I don’t know how widely Aldous Huxley is read to-day. When I was younger, and Brave New World was itself bravely new, he was de rigueur, a —

much as Kaffka and Sartre are to-day, and in much the same circles. To some extent, perhaps, he has passed out of fashion (a Wellington book-sale catalogue a few days ago listed "Eyeglass in Gaza" in its bargain section), but his short story The Gioconda Smile, on which the present film is based, has been a favourite with anthologists sinceé it first appeared some 25 years ago. The Gioconda Smile (itself a fictiona} version of a celebrated murder-case) is a good example of Huxley’s best man-ner-in which he combines’ deep psychological insight with a quality of detached — scientific observation which is no doubt the product of his early ‘training and environment. Certainly the story respects no artificial conventions. Mr. Hutton, the ageing dilettante whose hair is thinning more rapidly than his blood, is examined as closely (and as coldly) as a laboratory specimen. Miss Spence (she is of the Gioconda smile-"that small mouth pursed forward by the Gioconda expression into a little snout with a round hole in the middle") is dealt with just as mercilessly, and the full circle of ---

the action-the death of Hutton’s wife, his whimsical but’ secret remarriage and his maladroit rejection of Miss Spence, the whispers, the exhumation, inquest. trial, sentence and execution-forms as neat a study in. psychopathology as one could wish. It is both believable and dramatically satisfying. A Woman’s Vengeance falls short of the original in several respects. Charles Boyer, who has the principal part (Mr. Hutton becomes’ Mr. Maurier in the screen story), is handled a little more tenderly by Huxley the — scriptwriter than his prototype was, and in consequence seems a little more flabby, little more blurred at the edges. One misses the sharp detail, the illuminating aside of which Mr. Hutton was capable, but Mr. Mayrier apparently ° is not. Mr. Maurier (or should one say Mr. Boyer?) does not at any time, as Mr. Hutton did, see a vision of himself descending from one circle of the inferno to the next. Mr. Boyer simply moves from one scene to another in the manner to which one has become accustomed, and one is denied even that quickening of interest which his execution would have aroused. -_

As the very junior second wife, Ann Blyth is no more like the original Doris (who was no better than she might have been) than Mr. Maurier is like Mr. Hutton, but Jessica Tandy does manage to convey something of the smouldering fire of Janet "Spence ("Agrippina from the brows upwards’) and the ingrowing hatred which finally sends Mr. Maurier to the gallows. Of course, not all the way to the gallows, for on the screen even Aldous Huxley must bow to the conventions, and the confession which the — softspoken Dr, Libbard extracted.from Miss Spence after poor Mr. Hutton had been safely stowed in quicklime is by a sort of ten-minute-alibi jiggery-pokery precipitated early enough for the astute doctor to phone the prison governor end save Mr. Maurier. But if Huxley has been forced to write himself down to the level of dimlit melodrama, it is at least still Huxley who has done the writing and a good deal of his quality gets through in spite of the restrictions. A Woman’s Vengeance, for all its shortcomings, is a better than average film -with some good lines and some moments that are better than melodramatic. As _ the rather melancholy Dr. Libbard Sir Cedric Hardwicke is unobtrusively excellent.