1945’s The Seventh Veil is a psychological thriller along the lines of Gaslight (1940, 1944*) but lacking the frightening tone and twists of the classic. But it’s very well acted, particularly by its leads, Ann Todd and James Mason, two Brits who were largely unknown in the States at the time.
The movie opens with an attempted suicide of a former concert pianist, Francesca (Todd), who’s now mute and (obviously) despondent. A psychologist, played by Herbert Lom, places Francesca under hypnosis in order to determine what has put her in the state she’s in, and much of the movie is told in subsequent flashback, from Francesca’s discovery of her musical talents as a schoolchild to her being looked after by a distant cousin (Mason) to falling in love (then out, then in again). Somewhere along the line, she developed a neurosis so acute that she couldn’t even look at a piano without flinching. What’s happened to her?
Todd is wonderful. She’s not naturally beautiful; her Francesca is painfully shy, often answering her cousin Nicholas’s questions with one word, and consequently she’s tough for other people to understand. She feels she’s alone, but her musical abilities make her feel alive and a part of something, and it’s this talent that Nicholas helps to nurture, either for her benefit or for his own.
Mason is equally elliptical in his treatment of Francesca; he is at times brutish and selfish. I’m reminded of the old line, “Is it for His glory, or for yours?” – it applies here, as Mason is sort of Pygmalion and Machiavelli combined. The suave Mason never lets you assume he’s either bad or good; his honest intentions aren’t completely known until the movie is over.
The ending feels kind of like an Occam’s Razor ending – the easiest solution, in other words. It’s not as twisty as I’d have hoped; when Francesca must make a choice, she makes an unsurprising one. But that is sort of in keeping with her character, who is fairly humdrum and predictable herself. The difference is that Francesca, and by extent Todd, is enigmatic even within her quietude.
You could classify this, perhaps, as minor Hitchcock, from an era that he dominated. Another to see, along with Gaslight, would be Dead of Night (1945).
*There were two versions of this scissors-mad story. The 1940 version is the British one; the movie was remade four years later in Hollywood with Charles Boyer and Angela Lansbury.
