One of the finest British films of the si­lent period, The Constant Nymph tells the story of Lewis Dodd (Ivor Novello), a young composer who comes to stay in the Austrian Tyrol with the unconven­tional family of his musical mentor who dies leaving his daughters to make their way in the unfamiliar and stifling atmo­sphere of middle class London society. After the open spaces and informality of the mountains the dark and cloying draw­ing rooms of the city are oppressive to the free spirits of Tessa (Mabel Poulton), the younger daughter, and to Lewis, who has rashly married Tessa’s cousin, a woman with social ambitions for him. Tessa and Lewis find solace in their mutual and passionate longing for freedom, palpably expressed in the performance of Lewis’s romantic symphony and in their tragic at­tempt to escape the inevitable. This pro­gressive ‘closing in’ makes the work feel like a film of two halves but is precisely intentional. This is spelt out in a surviv­ing script held by the BFI from which we can deduce something of Alma Reville’s role in the production, which was firstly to adapt Margaret Kennedy’s popular play and novel and later to arrange the con­tinuity. From the script we can see that her ambitions for the symphony sequence in which the ‘music’ would evoke imagery of the alpine idyll on screen, were reined back by handwritten comments from co-writer Angus McPhail, probably to cut costs. If it seems strange that her work should be checked, it is worth noting that even the director, Adrian Brunel, was be­ing supervised by the cautious producers. The screenplay credits went to Margaret Kennedy herself and Basil Dean who had helped adapt her novel for the stage.