OVP: The Seventh Veil (1945)

Film: The Seventh Veil (1945)

Stars: James Mason, Ann Todd, Herbert Lom, Hugh McDermott, Albert Lieven

Director: Compton Bennett

Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Original Screenplay*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Sexual politics have, as you can imagine, changed since 1945, pretty much exclusively for the better.  This means that when you watch an old film, particularly one that is about the dynamics of a woman succeeding in a man's world, you have to adjust your expectations.  I will be honest, though, that when I started The Seventh Veil, I didn't think I'd have to adjust as much as I did.  British melodramas of this era are often reductive to women, but they still will find a way to make a woman's power feel like something desirable to the audience, even if it's in a titillating way.  Both of our stars today (James Mason & Ann Todd) have starred in some of the better examples of this like The Wicked Lady or Madeleine.  Unfortunately, The Seventh Veil does not stand next to the campy, seedy pleasures of those two pictures.

(Spoilers Ahead) Francesca Cunningham (Todd) is a celebrated concert pianist who is under the delusion that she has lost the ability to use her hands, despite no such actual malady.  Dr. Larsen (Lom) is trying to help her through hypnosis to regain the use of her hands, and as a result we are treated to flashbacks into Francesca's life, including her upbringing from a vicious second cousin, Nicholas (Mason), who berates her but this does pay off with her learning to play the piano.  We also get a look into her love life during this time, first to conductor Peter (McDermott), and then to Nicholas's artist friend Max (Lieven), both of whom fall for her.  In the end, all three men pursue Francesca, who through hypnosis has overcome her apprehension about the piano, but now has also lost all inhibitions, and can only go to the man she will be happy with.  This results in her picking not her more respectable beaus, but instead Nicholas, whose passion is the only one that she responds toward.

The movie itself is, well, dull.  I actually quite like the British melodramas of the 1940's, and both Mason & Todd have been actors I've admired in this motif.  Their intense, overly-expressive acting styles suit the genre, and they can be quite salacious, and unlike American film of that era, brimming with a bit of sex (we leave relatively confident that not only is Francesca not a virgin, she seems to have had sex with a couple of men before the curtain falls).  But the film itself is repetitive, too much of Pygmalion, not enough originality, certainly not for a writing trophy, and without better dialogue, I don't entirely get what the Academy was thinking.

The biggest problem for me, though, is the movie's treatment of Nicholas.  As I mentioned above, the film's sexual politics are problematic, and usually I can get beyond that.  After all, it's the mid-40's-feminism involved things like getting the vote (which in 1945 was only 17 years in the making in Great Britain), not necessarily focusing on female independence.  But that they have so much of the conversation in the film being about Francesca's choices, about her wanting to choose for herself (never mind that she's been hypnotized by a man to be the sort of person to make those choices), makes the ending kind of gross.  Nicholas has been abusive to her the whole film, treating her like garbage & literally smashing her fingers (and her dreams) down with the piano's fallboard.  He doesn't deserve her, and he doesn't truly apologize where you should even expect her to forgive him.  This is a step too-far for me, and left an already dull film egregiously sexist.