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Joseph Shearing who is credited here as the author of the source novel "The Crime of Laura Sauelle" was actually a British woman born Gabrielle Margaret Vere Long, née Campbell who also wrote under the names Marjorie Bowen and George Praedy among many other pseudonyms.

Also the source novel is not "The Crime of Laura Sarelle" (1941) but "Moss Rose" (1935). Evidently the script was worked on by five different screenwriters including an uncredited contributions from James M. Cain. Darryl F. Zanuck fooled around with the screenplay and the editing post-production and much of the uneven tone and bewildering inconsistencies of characterization stem from the need to tone down the unsympathetic qualities of the heroine and censor the sordid background of the story.

One of Shearing/Bowen/Long's specialties was adapting true crime stories from the Victoiran era into thriller novels. One of these novels was "So Evil, My Love" which was released in 1948 and was based on the 1876 murder of Charles Bravo.

Shearing/Bowen te al. Publshed "Moss Rose" in 1935 and it was based on the murder of genteel prostitute Clara Bruton born Harriet Buswell who was murdered in her lodging house in No. 12 Great Coram Street near Russell Square early on Christmas morning 1872. Buswell was an educated woman from the lower classes who had some education and haunted the Alhambra looking for custumers. On Christmas Eve she picked up a customer who was observed by several witnesses to have a German accent and is described as a "gentleman" by Buswell. She was found the next morning in her bed with her throat slashed from ear to ear and an open bible beside her. One of the suspects who was identified by witnesses was a married German minister who was later exonerated when an alibi was provided. The case was never solved.

Shearing/Bowen adapted the unsolved murder into a novel where Belle Adair, a neighbor of the Harriet muder victim (now called Daisy Arrow) witnesses a German accented man leaving the victim's bedroom and decides to blackmail him. However, whereas Belle Adair/Rose Lynton in the 1947 movie is a cockney dancer who is not a prostitute but is capable of taking advantage of stage door Johnnies to get by while evading taking them home to her lodging house. In the novel, Belle Adair came from a middle class fairly genteel circumstances but fell into disrepute. A sometime dancer in pantos she has descended into indoor prostitution. No longer young, Adair is considering suicide on Christmas Eve but her neighbor Daisy confiscates her knife - the knife that is later used to kill her.

Whereas the Belle/Rose of the film is a lower class girl who dreams of being a lady, the novel's heroine is older and broken down by life and her own bad choices. She has been a lady or ladylike and can pass as genteel in society. Her need to escape her current life and remake herself is more desperately urgent and she is basically spiraling down the gutter. Hence when she finds the German minister who she suspects of being Daisy's killer she blackmails him and convinces him to take her to Germany to be the companion of his ailing mother.

Why did the film make the changes to Belle and the suspect? They couldn't have a prostitue be the heroine of the story due to the Hays Code so she was only a chorus girl. The character increasingly becomes less amoral and more helpless which is inconsistent with her behavior earlier in the film. She goes from scheming doxy to wide-eyed ingenue/victim.

Changing the German minister to a half-English country gentleman who was raised in Canada becomes necessary for several reasons - the Hays Code wouldn't approve a story of a minister consorting with and murdering prostitutes like Jack the Ripper. Also, in 1947 we had just come off of World War II and Germans were associated with Nazis and evil. Making our hero German (maybe played by Helmut Dantine or Francis Lederer?) would point to his villainy - so his nationality and religious vocation had to be changed. Victor Mature also couldn't do accents well, so the Canadian upbringing solves that problem.

Add in the too many cooks working on the screenplay and Zanuck's meddling and you have a recipe for disaster. As it is, the solid atmospheric direction by Gregory Ratoff, Peggy Cummins' charm and a fascinating supporting cast make for a diverting if obvious murder mystery that doesn't hold together well when analyzed after the fact but is very watchable as it unreels.

TCM recently managed to clear the rights of this film from the literary executors of Basil Dean (who coauthored the play version) and Margaret Kennedy (who authored the novel and play adaptation). The television premiere was on TCM on September 28, 2011. The original 1924 novel has been reprinted in paperback but I have not read it yet.

It seems that the 1943 Hollywood adaptation cleans most of the sex out of the story which was dealt with in the novel. Also the book focuses on the entire Sanger family while the film (and play) focuses on the central triangle of Tessa, Lewis Dodd and Florence. I think that Boyer and Fontaine are somewhat miscast as Tessa and Dodd though both perform excellently. It seems that in the novel the pair become lovers though Tessa is underage and they actually do escape together to Brussels. Also, the sister Toni Sanger already has had a sexual affair with Birnbaum, played in the movie by Peter Lorre as Fritz Bercovy. In the film both affairs remain chaste - at least until Toni Sanger is safely married to the Birnbaum/Bercovy character.

In the film, the pedophilia issue is dodged by having Dodd and Tessa realize and acknowledge they are lovers/soul mates without any form of consummation - even kissing. Their love is idealized and unrealizable on this earth. One love scene that was probably played for real in the book or play is done as a "dream vision" by Tessa while she listen's to Dodd's symphony on the radio.

Fontaine is too old but shows a remarkable lack of vanity - wearing no makeup and using an awkward, hyperactive physicality to suggest an adolescent girl. Boyer comes off as too much the mature European roué - Robert Donat, Errol Flynn and Leslie Howard were all considered for the part. Not enough is made of Lewis' social nonconformity - in the book he is also the son of wealth who repudiates his class and its values. Alexis Smith as Florence, the unhappy excluded wife comes off best in some ways - her character has a genuine conflict going on and is proactive. Smith as another poster mentioned is simultaneously hateful, understandable and pitiful and she fights for a relationship that is essentially doomed. Florence's attraction to bohemian artistic types is in conflict with her basic inability to sympathize with their lifestyles and values. This conflict is truthfully captured by Smith and Goulding.

The studio sets in the Austrian Tyrol scenes look like a mix of Kentucky farm and English moors and are not convincing. There is a genuine sophistication here but without the characters taking that final fatal step into the forbidden, some of the guts of the story is lost. The previous two adaptation of the book - a 1928 silent with Ivor Novello and Mabel Poulton (preserved by the BFI) and an unavailable or lost 1934 remake with Victoria Hopper and Brian Aherne evidently hewed closer to the novel.

Basically this is a small town soap opera about the drama in the lives of various members of the town council of a small Yorkshire town. Much of this drama is engineered by the hiring of Sarah Burton, an idealistic new head schoolmistress from a working class background.

Superb acting by Ralph Richardson and Edna Best with strong supporting turns by John Clements and Edmund Gwenn. An adolescent Glynis Johns already has that distinctive voice as Ralph Richardson's high-strung young daughter. Wait for a gorgeous young Ann Todd as Sir Ralph's unstable wife in a flashback sequence. Everyone is quite young here and in good form.

The nuanced characterizations help flesh out a story that ends up being formulaic because a long novel has been compressed into a 84 minute programmer. Because of the compression, characters go from despising each other to being in love in a matter of minutes. Lots of plot lines are tied up and passed by in a pat way. Still quite enjoyable anyway though it could have been more with better writing and direction. I am quite interested in the 1974 miniseries with Dorothy Tutin - the extra time would give the characters more depth and more convincing development.