This film was originally released as BRIEF ECSTASY and is a minor precursor of the famous BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945) which David Lean was to make eight years later with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. Both express the dilemma of hopelessly intense and passionate love between two people who cannot be together because one of them is married and must remain faithful. Both films have anguished scenes of thwarted passion, desperate and harrowing temptation and heroic self-sacrifice. A similar theme was of course central also to the ending of CASABLANCA (1942). Those were the days of the stiff upper lip and of honour above everything. This film was released as DANGEROUS SECRETS in the USA, where it had 20 minutes of its original 72 minutes cut out of it, according to reviewer Ingenlode Wordsmith. I don't know what happened to the full 72 minutes, but a 66 minute version (4 minutes longer than the USA version) has now been released on DVD along with three other titles in The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection, Volume 2. The film is real lost gem, although one can see that numerous scenes appear to be shorter than they should be and have been cut. An entire song in a nightclub has been removed and replaced by a shadow of a saxophone player on the wall and other such effects, despite the fact that they had paid for the singer and we get a glimpse of her. (Was she a disappointing warbler, one wonders?) The film has a fine atmosphere and was directed by the French director Edmond T. Gréville, (1906-1966) whose original name was Edmond Gréville Thonger, but as Thonger, pronounced 'thong-ay', was clearly intractable to the English-speaking tongue, and was also less mellifluous, the director opted for his middle name as a surname, as seen in the credits. In all, he directed 40 films (the last in 1963), many of them in French and one apparently in Dutch (in 1948). The most famous is certainly PRINCESS TAM-TAM with the amazing Josephine Baker (1935), a film which no one interested in that icon of Paris culture between the Wars can afford to miss. BRIEF ECSTASY features a magnificent performance by the Hungarian émigré actor Paul Lukas, who became such a famous star of the second rank. Opposite him is the much younger Linden Travers (aged 24), who marries him because she believes her earlier love, played by Hugh Williams, has abandoned her by going to India and forgetting about her. (His cable asking her to marry him is swept up and thrown away by her cleaning lady.) Linden Travers is very much in the Celia Johnson mould. They were both febrile with an idealistic love, trembling with suppressed passion, their high-pitched voices quavering pitifully as they suffer. They were the 'victim women' who were fashionable in those pre-War days. How they trembled like reeds in the wind, how their tears flowed as their eyes shone with love! The film is an incredible time-capsule of forgotten manners and mores. I cannot imagine how any young person of today could possibly believe it, they way all those people dress and behave. Always in white tie or black tie at least, brave formality on display, and always erect and proud as they suffer. And those men! Such silly fellows! But I can assure all doubters that such people genuinely existed and were not just the products of film makers' imaginations. When I was young I knew many such people left over and grown old. And they were just like that. They were 'shall we stand on the deck stiffly at attention and go down with the ship with dignity' types. And the men were often so far from being masculine that many of them were whinnying ninnies. Such types were at the time called 'rigs', that being a term borrowed from the world of horses, where a rig is a stallion who sniffs round a mare but cannot be persuaded to mount her. Lukas is not a rig in the film, he is a solid professor, whose personal faults are jealousy, instinctive male domination ('my wife has quit her job in the laboratory and is having a more settled life at home now'), and dullness. Hugh Williams is what at the time was called 'a cad'. That means a heartless seducer who gets carried away by his passions and 'ruins a woman'. 'Rig' and 'cad' were good words, and must never be forgotten in these days when nobody cares, and when all fine distinctions have become meaningless in the amorphous welter of hyper-sexuality which has inundated our contemporary world like a tsunami of abandon. The film has many arty moments. Gréville created many effective silent scenes and a great deal of montage constructed of closeups and creative angles. Many of these have a great deal of impact, and the final shot could have been designed by Rodin. Gréville was clearly taking advantage of making a B picture where no one was watching what he was doing in order to inject a great deal of artistic innovation. Presumably most of the cuts were of such material, though much of it survives and is impressive. The film is such a period piece that you have to be prepared for everybody to be a bit too precious, because everyone then really was a bit too precious. Call it 'time travel'.
Review of Dangerous Secrets
