directed by Lewis Allen
109 minutes
In the late 1800s, Mark Bellis (Ray Milland) meets Olivia Harwood while traveling from Jamaica back to England. He has malaria and she helps to nurse him back to health. She recently lost her husband to disease. She is resistant to his advances, after he has recovered. Mark is persistent and eventually Olivia falls in love with him, unaware that he has another woman or that he is wanted for forgery and murder.
Olivia reconnects with Susan Courtney (Geraldine Fitzgerald), an old friend from school who married a much more successful man than Olivia did. Henry, Susan's husband, is very strict with Susan. He controls the money in the family and doesn't let her go outside. Susan drinks too much. Henry hires Olivia to come live them and look after Susan.
Olivia, with some prodding from Mark, encourages Susan to try rekindling a romance with a man she met overseas and with whom she once had an affair. Mark has copies of the letters made. Olivia gets her hands on some bonds that Susan owns and turns them over to Mark. He sells them for hundreds of pounds.
Olivia, with some encouragement from Mark, but of her own free will, attempts to use the letters to blackmail Henry. She threatens to make the letters public if he doesn't pay up. Henry threatens to turn over to the police a report from a private investigator about Mark if Olivia doesn't hand over the letters. Olivia and Henry get into an argument and Henry suffers a heart attack.
Olivia is desperate. Henry is still alive. She poisons his heart medicine. Susan administers some of her husband's medication to him, unaware that it is laced with poison. It is known that she and Henry were having marital problems. It isn't long before Susan is arrested and put on trial for murder.
Mark and Olivia make plans to head to France but Mark encourages her to stick around. He is worried that if she disappears at that moment then she will draw unwanted attention to both of them.
Olivia starts to have second thoughts about what she has done. Henry was an awful person but she is distraught by the likelihood that Susan will be hanged for the murder of Henry. Things finally come to a head after the private investigator comes to see Olivia and she meets Mark's other woman.
Thoughts
I wasn't sure what to expect goin in to this movie. The story evolves at a fairly relaxed pace. Olivia's transition from innocence to active participant in the blackmail of her friend's husband didn't happen in the blink of an eye. It also wasn't clear to me, based on Ann Todd's performance, when that change happened. Maybe I just wasn't focused on the right things, at least in part because I wasn't sure where the story was going.
The story really started to get interesting to me after Henry was killed. The story was mostly Olivia's up to that point but from then until the end Olivia was the focal point of the movie and there was no longer any pretense that Mark was the main character. I was also obsessed from that point on with trying to figure out how it was going to end. I knew that Olivia and Mark weren't going to get away with it, because of the code, but I had trouble foreseeing how their downfall would transpire.
I can see how this movie might not appeal to everyone. It took some patience on my part to get through the first half of it. Despite that fact, I could see myself watching it again.
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