A confined, upper-class English girl is passed over to a guardian where she is made to practice piano.
Leave it to the British to treat the subject of repressed emotion with such class and restraint. Francesca (Todd) is the very epitome of repressed feeling thanks to those presiding tyrannically over her life. Her only release from a cheerless existence are lushly romantic concerts, where the gloriously surging music echoes what's inside her. Without that, we might never know what lies beyond those tightly pursed lips. Even her quietly assertive flings with Peter and Maxwell are stripped of anything like outward emotions.
And all the time, her crippled guardian (Mason) makes her practice and practice and practice, alone and in an empty mansion. Poor Francesca, no wonder she cracks up. Nonetheless, it's drawing room drama at its most civilized.
I get a kick out of imagining how a boisterous American studio such as Warner Bros. would have handled the material, maybe with Joan Crawford in the lead. Anyway, Todd is appropriately restrained, while Mason is darkly mysterious as the Svengali taskmaster. But, I'm still wondering why that last scene seems so right when the screenplay has given us so little preparation to think it would be. Maybe it's the power of Mason's brooding presence that makes it work, but I think it does.
Anyway, as long as you don't mind presiding psychiatrists (Lom) with an answer for everything that ails us, this may be your cup of tea, British style.
Leave it to the British to treat the subject of repressed emotion with such class and restraint. Francesca (Todd) is the very epitome of repressed feeling thanks to those presiding tyrannically over her life. Her only release from a cheerless existence are lushly romantic concerts, where the gloriously surging music echoes what's inside her. Without that, we might never know what lies beyond those tightly pursed lips. Even her quietly assertive flings with Peter and Maxwell are stripped of anything like outward emotions.
And all the time, her crippled guardian (Mason) makes her practice and practice and practice, alone and in an empty mansion. Poor Francesca, no wonder she cracks up. Nonetheless, it's drawing room drama at its most civilized.
I get a kick out of imagining how a boisterous American studio such as Warner Bros. would have handled the material, maybe with Joan Crawford in the lead. Anyway, Todd is appropriately restrained, while Mason is darkly mysterious as the Svengali taskmaster. But, I'm still wondering why that last scene seems so right when the screenplay has given us so little preparation to think it would be. Maybe it's the power of Mason's brooding presence that makes it work, but I think it does.
Anyway, as long as you don't mind presiding psychiatrists (Lom) with an answer for everything that ails us, this may be your cup of tea, British style.