PRIVATE LIVES meets ANNA KARENINA in a David Lean pic from his overlooked ‘middle-period.’* A prestige item for future wife Ann Todd which he took over from Ronald Neame, who retains producer credit. From an H.G. Wells novel about the tragic consequences of an affair he had in Boer War days, the modernized Eric Ambler script can’t fully account for nearly four decades of social change & two World Wars, robbing the story of its scandalous motivation. Todd, looking like Joan Fontaine’s less photogenic stand-in, is raptly in love with scientist/professor Trevor Howard, but, distrustful of passionate commitment, turns to companionate marriage with wealthy international financier Claude Rains. They weather one crisis, but nine years later, a chance meeting with the long happily married Howard at accidentally booked adjoining rooms (with balcony in the Alps!), is espied & misinterpreted by Rains who finds enough circumstantial evidence to start divorce proceedings. Nothing much wrong here, and Lean’s taste for plots with infidelity runs from BRIEF ENCOUNTER to DR. ZHIVAGO, but only Rains finds something to play in his characterization. Elsewise, wan doings. Or is until the last reel, when yet one more mistimed renunciation takes a bad turn and the film goes all ANNA KARENINA on us in a stunningly crafted suicide set piece, shot & edited to a fare-the-well; it all but demands viewing..
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Between Lean’s early Noël Coward/Charles Dickens adaptations and his later ‘thinking man’s’ international epics.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Initially retitled ONE WOMAN’S STORY Stateside, since PASSIONATE wasn’t allowed to be used in titles at the time. Imagine it on a marque. Shocking!
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