Anthony Pelissier (1951)
The two leads are the best, though not the only good, reason for seeing this British romantic thriller, adapted by Winston (Poldark) Graham from his 1950 novel of the same name. Shot in black and white (by Guy Green), the film is set mostly on the French Riviera. Giles Gordon (David Farrar), a former lawyer and English expatriate, has retired there, after losing most of his sight in a shell blast during recent World War II service. He meets and falls in love with Alix Delaisse (Nadia Gray), who currently works in a shoe shop but has a more remarkable past. The widow of a French Resistance fighter, she’s mixed up with blackmail and black markets – according to sinister restaurant owner Pierre Chava (Gérard Landry), who warns Gordon off Alix for self-interested reasons too, claiming that now promised to him. As the plot thickens, another and no less possessive man in Alix’s life comes to the fore – her brother Louis Malinay (Maurice Teynac).
The protagonist’s eye condition, reflected in the title, gives distinctiveness to the early stages of the central romance. Gordon’s not being quite blind makes his inability clearly to see Alix more tantalising. Once his lack of sight starts to impede the progress of the story, he returns briefly to London for an operation; a no-nonsense ophthalmic surgeon (Clive Morton) fully restores the sight in Gordon’s left eye. When he comes back to France and Alix, Gordon can now see just what he was missing. At the same time, the shadows of her past and her murky present continue to obscure his view of who she really is …
Best known for his work in Powell and Pressburger films (Black Narcissus, The Small Back Room, Gone to Earth), David Farrar is an authentic leading man. He’s a strongly but not an aggressively masculine presence. It wouldn’t be going too far to say that he has, as well as good looks, a natural nobility that is always unstressed. Farrar may have lacked James Mason’s range but he’s good enough to bring that more famous contemporary to mind. I don’t recall having seen the beautiful Nadia Gray, who was Romanian, in anything other than Fellini’s La dolce vita (where she famously performs a striptease at a party celebrating her character’s divorce). Gray is physically very suitable to play the femme fatale of Anthony Pelissier’s film. She’s a skilful actress too: as Alix becomes more visible to Giles Gordon, so Gray builds a fuller portrait of a woman threatened with, and frustrated by, the various obstacles in her way to happiness with the hero.
The script includes a fair amount of untranslated French dialogue. This reinforces the sense of Gordon, who speaks only very basic French, being in an alien environment – and vulnerable there, especially for as long as he’s nearly blind. In the early stages, the French are mostly characterised as exotically dodgy. As Night Without Stars goes on and the traumatic legacies of Occupation emerge, the film’s attitude deepens into something more sympathetic. There’s some primitive acting in smaller parts and a lot of spelling-it-out music (by William Alwyn). A fairly conventional, though reasonably exciting, action climax overshadows the blink-and-you-miss-it happy ending. But Anthony Pelissier gets, and keeps, going a good narrative rhythm and there’s sustained chemistry between the principals.
22 January 2020
