“Pray terminate the shocking spectacle!” cries schoolmistress Martita Hunt, after finding her charges throwing snowballs. Many British critics felt the same as they watched this and the other costume melodramas that followed from Gainsborough Pictures during and after the Second World War. Among the carpers was James Mason, who gave to Lord Rohan – the scowling man permanently dressed in a fancy grey tailcoat – some of the rancid dislike he himself felt for the role. Yet the public loved the film, as they had its source novel by the eccentric Lady Eleanor Smith. It’s not hard to see why. After four years of war, women audiences desperately needed escape and colour, and the Regency years of aristocratic excess (the 1810s) proved the perfect playground. Cold-hearted gentlemen and rapacious women in low-cut dresses leaped from popular novels onto the screen to lie, deceive, steal, and murder. Sixty years later their spell hasn’t faded. We watch delighted as Margaret Lockwood’s mendacious Hesther worms her way into the loveless marriage of her nave good friend Phyllis Calvert. We feast on the strident sexual dynamics; note especially, one hour in, the bite on the hand from Lockwood that stirs Mason into a possessive kiss. Though in more muted fashion, these Gainsborough melodramas provided the same service as Hammer horrors did a decade later: they dragged out the sex and violence hiding behind those British cups of tea and stiff upper lips. Assigned his first major film after years as a scriptwriter, director Leslie Arliss does not conjure marvels. But there’s still a visual charge here, often generated by Arthur Crabtree’s camerawork, dappling characters in firelight and lending the sets a sensuous sheen. There is also the spectacle of Stewart Granger as the free spirit Rokeby. He was new to films then, and it shows, but his cocky masculinity blazes on the screen. Note too the jolt at the finish, when the story’s modern framework returns and for once the camera shows an authentic 1943 location – a wartime London street with a parked furniture van, cars, pedestrians, and a passing bus. It might be the film’s biggest shock.

Geoff Brown