The Seventh Veil (1945)
Directed by Compton Bennett

Film Review

Despite its contemporary setting and dabbling in psychoanalytics, The Seventh Veil looks very much as if it belongs to the same stable as Gainsborough's period melodramas, particularly as it features James Mason yet again playing the controlling brute with sadistic tendencies - the role he had played so brilliantly in Leslie Arliss's The Man in Grey (1943) and Anthony Asquith's Fanny by Gaslight (1944).  Whilst it is heavily imbued with the brooding Gothic atmosphere of Gainsborough's lavish costume dramas and offers a familiar tale of female domination by an unsavoury rogue, The Seventh Veil was actual produced by a small independent film company run by Sydney Box.  The film was made on a modest budget of £90,000 but it raked in over two million pounds at the box office, making it one of the most successful films ever  to come out of a British film studio.  The film's success led to a stage version in London, with Ann Todd and Herbert Lom reprising their roles.  It also garnered an Oscar for its screenplay and was entered in the 1946 Cannes Film Festival.

Part of the reason for the success of The Seventh Veil was that it latched onto a widespread popular interest in Freud's psychoanalytical theories, something that resulted in a prominent sub-genre of film noir melodrama in the late 1940s.  Hot on the heels of this film came Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), which set the psychobabble bandwagon rolling, with directors such as Robert Siodmak (The Dark Mirror), Rudolph Maté' (The Dark Past) and Fritz Lang (Secret Beyond the Door) all keen to get in on the act.  In common with most of these films, the supposed science underpinning The Seventh Veil is unlikely to stand up to scrutiny today but it is sufficiently plausible to the layman to hold together the slightly fanciful plot.  The idea that the mind has seven veils, behind which we conceal our true identity (in the way that Salome once concealed her beauty), is certainly an intriguing one, and one of the film's shortcomings is that it perhaps doesn't explore this concept as fully as it might.

A more obvious failing is apparent in the first third of the film, where Ann Todd appears somewhat ridiculous playing a schoolgirl in her mid-teens (at the time the actress was in fact 36).  Todd comes into her own later on in the film, but you wonder why a younger actress wasn't cast to play her character, at least in the film's early scenes.  On the other hand, there's probably no other actor in the whole of time and space better suited than James Mason for the part of Todd's Svengali-like, woman hating second cousin.  Less whip-crackingly dastardly than he was in his films for Gainsborough, Mason still has an aura of quiet menace about him, along with a tragic Byronic quality that makes him less a villain and more an object of sympathy - at least until he reverts to form and starts hitting people with his walking stick.

Herbert Lom is just as sinister on the surface (how could he not, with his pronounced Slavic accent, penetrating gaze and severe looks?), but there is also a warmth and humanity beneath the cold exterior that makes his Dr Larsen a curiously ambiguous character - a far cry from Lom's best known screen creation, Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther films.  More than anything, it is the unsettling ambiguity of Mason and Lom's portrayals and the way their characters accidently mirror one another that makes The Seventh Veil such a memorably dark film - that and the way that music is used throughout to express the protagonists' inner turmoil as, metaphorically speaking, they dance the dance of the seven veils and discover who they are.  The plot may be a little hard to swallow (the ending takes melodrama to new heights of absurdity) and Compton Bennett's direction lacks the inspired touch, but none of this is enough to prevent The Seventh Veil from being one of the more enjoyable examples of British film noir.

Film Synopsis

After Francesca Cunningham, a world class pianist, has attempted suicide, an eminent psychiatrist, Dr Larsen, subjects her to a form of hypnotic treatment to uncover the reasons for her self-destructive tendencies.  Francesca is taken back to her adolescence when, after the death of her parents, she found herself in the care of a reclusive older cousin, Nicholas.  Since his mother abandoned him as a child, Nicholas has grown into a bitter man who shuns the society of women, but he soon develops a protective interest in Francesca and encourages her to pursue a career as a pianist.  Whilst studying at the Royal College of Music, Francesca falls in love with an American band musician named Peter, but when she asks Nicholas to grant his consent to their marriage he refuses to give it.  Instead, he whisks her off to Paris to continue her education.  Some years later, after their return to London, Nicholas commissions the artist Maxwell Leyden to paint a portrait of his ward.  Nicholas reacts badly to the news that Francesa and Leyden are in love, but as the couple elope they are involved a car accident which leaves Francesa convinced that her music career is over.  As Dr Larsen encourages Francesa to shed the seventh and final veil screening her innermost thoughts, the pianist's future happiness hangs in the balance...