Directed by Albert de Courville, Seven Sinners was based on the 1927 stage play by Arnold Ridley and Bernard Merivale, and 1929 film called The Wrecker , directed by Gezy von Bolvary. The train wreck sequences were so well done, they were reused for the 1936 film, now retitled Seven Sinners . The screenplay was by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, who would soon write two other train-themed films; Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Carol Reed's Night Train to Munich (1940). The adaptation was by L. DuGarde Peach, with additional dialogue by Austin Melford. What separates this film from a Hollywood production of 1936 is the dialogue. After American censors more strictly imposed the Production Code in 1934, much of the slightly risqué lines and adult situations all but vanished. The English were less restrained, allowing Seven Sinners to have a sophistication that was missing in Hollywood until the 1950s.
De Courville came to films in 1930, having produced revues for the stage. At the time he was hired by Michael Balcon's Gaumont-British studios to make Seven Sinners , he had had a serious a nervous breakdown, perhaps leading Balcon to say of de Courville that he was a man "of extraordinary if erratic charm." De Courville would make eight more films before returning to the stage in 1940.
Edmund Lowe had been a star in silent films, most notably with Victor McLaglen in Raoul Walsh's military comedy What Price Glory (1926), had played romantic and elegant roles in the talkies, and is perhaps best remembered today as the doctor Jean Harlow pines for in Dinner at Eight (1933). By 1936, leading roles in "A" pictures were beginning to dry up for Lowe in Hollywood, as the public's taste had changed to more "he-man" stars like Clark Gable. It was a common practice for stars whose careers were on the decline to accept assignments in England in the years before World War II, and both Lowe and Constance Cummings went to Gaumont-British. Still in her mid-20s, Cummings had also worked in silent pictures and made the transition to talkies. After marrying writer/director Benn Levy, who would later become a member of Parliament, Cummings moved to England, where she would go on to star in the 1945 film version of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit , have a distinguished career on stage, and be awarded an eventual CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) by the Queen.
The film begins during Carnival in Nice, France, with fireworks and outlandish costumes. In the Hotel Gallico, a party is underway, complete with balloons and confetti. In the midst of all this celebration, a mysterious man in a grotesque mask finds American detective John Harwood (Loew) hopelessly drunk and dressed as the devil, sitting on a hallway floor. Using his own key, the stranger is able to open Harwood's room and help him in. Later in the evening, and slightly more sober, Harwood finds that staple of 1930s mysteries - a dead body in his room that turns out to be the mystery man he met earlier. On the way to inform the authorities, Harwood runs into Caryl Fenton (Cummings), an insurance agent sent to fetch him back to England. Back in the room with the hotel staff, Harwood and Fenton discover the body gone, and Harwood is dismissed as being drunk. A few hours later, while on train from Nice, Harwood dreams of the man he found dead, but his dream is violently disturbed as the train crashes and catches on fire. In the wreck is the body of the man from the hotel. Harwood only has time to rip off the man's cuff with a Parisian address written on it before the body is destroyed. When the train wreck is proved to have been deliberate, Harwood bets the police $5,000 that he can catch the those responsible.
Alfred Hitchcock was the most famous British director of the 1930s, soon to be wooed away from Hollywood. His influence on film was already strong, as Frank Nugent, critic for The New York Times noted in his review. The Roxy theater, where the film premiered in August 1936, had billed it as a follow-up to Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), but Nugent felt that while it would be easy to dismiss this as hype, but Seven Sinners was worth of Hitchcock. "On its own merits it is a crisp, humorous and deftly turned murder mystery in which Hollywood's Edmund Lowe and Constance Cummings lead an English cast through an exciting investigation of the strange case of the carnival corpse, the Nice-Paris express wreck, and the vague purposes of a reform group called the Pilgrims of Peace. [...]The investigation is ingenious, the quarry interesting, the motives strange and the denouement surprising. One has no right to ask for more. [...] If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Alfred Hitchcock has been sincerely flattered by Seven Sinners .
By Lorraine LoBianco
SOURCES:
Gifford, Denis British Film Catalogue: Two Volume Set - The Fiction Film/The Non-Fiction Film
Goble, Alan The Complete Index to Literary Sources in Film
Nevins, Francis M. Cornucopia of Crime: Memories and Summations
Nugent, Frank S. "Seven Sinners at the Roxy; Shows the Hitchcock Influence" The New York Times 22 Aug 36
Quinlan, David The Illustrated Guide to Film Directors
