The Seventh Veil

Although in many respects it looks and sounds like a B-grade film, Muriel and Sydney Box picked up the best Original Screenplay Oscar for this typically florid English war-time melodrama, complete with a pince-nez'd psychiatrist(Herbert Lom), pipe-smoking society painter (Albert Lieven), wealthy cripple (James Mason in his breakthrough role) and lashings of classical music.

Ann Todd plays a concert pianist who attracts the attention of three men (quite inexplicable as she appears to have had an embalmer as a make-up artist and has the sexual allure of a stranded pike but, hey, this is the English idea of sex so let's leave the physical out. In principle the idea is interesting but the execution is so highly conventionalized, and at times perfunctory, (virtually the entire Maxwell Leyden aspect fits this bill) that only Mason's charismatic good looks makes this watchable.

 

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