Madness of the Heart

When Alfred Hitchcock collaborator Charles Bennett turned his hand to directing, the result bore less of a resemblance to his screenplays for Blackmail (1929), The 39 Steps (1935) and Foreign Correspondent (1940) than it did to a Hitchcock project in which he was not involved - Rebecca (1940). Based on the 1941 romance novel by Flora Sandström but awash in Gothic flavor that owes a passing debt to Daphne du Maurier, Madness of the Heart (1949) stars Margaret Lockwood as a woman whose blindness has sent her scrambling for the sanctuary of convent life. Redeemed by the love of nobleman Paul Dupuis, Lockwood reenters society with a renewed sense of hope but senses she is unwelcome in her new husband's ancestral home and suspects that her life is in danger. Though the soul of the plot is Lockwood's perseverance over adversity the narrative is driven by third-billed Kathleen Byron's dissembling Verite, a suitable surrogate for Rebecca's mad Mrs. Danvers. Byron's career-defining turn as an unstable nun in Black Narcissus (1947) should have brought her more varied and rewarding film work but she was instead saddled with like-minded lunatic roles such as this. Charles Bennett would helm only one more feature but later penned the screenplays for Jacques Tourneur's classic Night of the Demon (1957) and somewhat less than classic War Gods of the Deep (1965). By Richard Harland Smith