Madonna of the Seven Moons

Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger strike a pose

Arthur Crabtree's Madonna of the Seven Moons is a ridiculous melodrama released by Gainsborough Pictures in 1945. Unlike most of the Gainsborough romantic melodramas which are set in Restoration England, the picture is set in Italy before the Second World War. The picture centers on Maddalena (Phyllis Calvert) who, as the picture begins, is a teen being educated in a remote convent. In the first reel, Maddalena is raped by a peasant, the subsequent trauma triggers a "dual personality" in her with tragic repercussions. The film leaps two decades ahead and finds Maddalena married to a rich aristocrat (John Stuart, suitably dull as dishwater) and living in Rome. They are awaiting the arrival of their daughter Angela (Patricia Roc) who has been abroad in the UK for the past five years attending finishing school. She is not her mother's little girl anymore.

Whereas Maddalena has her hair up and is dressed primly. Angela has her hair down and shows as much skin as the British censors would allow. One of the many absurdities of the picture is that Ms. Calvert was only four months older than her onscreen daughter, Ms. Roc. Another is that the notion that the curvy Ms. Roc could have been birthed by the more boyish Ms. Calvert. Yet another is that even though almost all of the characters are Italian they speak with pronounced British accents. I don't think modern audiences can suspend this much disbelief. However, I must say I enjoyed some aspects of the picture. Peter Glenville has the most ridiculously pronounced British accent, but he superbly embodies an oily rake named Sandro. Angela succeeds in loosening up her tightly wound Ma, but an incident at a ball triggers her split personality.

This is when the script of the film, based on Margery Lawrence's novel goes as cuckoo as that justly forgotten author. We subsequently learn that Maddalena has had these episodes before in which she has abandoned hubby and child for a year at a time and then returned offering no explanation. While her husband dithers during her absence, the audience happily follows Maddalena to Florence where we meet her feisty doppelgänger, Rosanna. Calvert gets to let her hair down and show some cleavage as Rosanna. You can tell Calvert is having some fun with the role, unlike her clenched performance as Maddalena. Whenever Maddalena is having a traumatic flashback she curls her lip like Carol Burnett in her old comedy skits lampooning 40s movies and quakes. She looks like she is digesting a rotten apple and I suppose she is. Luckily, Rosanna has a dashing thief for a lover named Nino who is played by Stewart Granger. Granger adds some dash to the film without putting too much sauce on the pasta.

Stewart Granger and Phyllis Calvert

Granger and Calvert had both been featured in 1943's The Man in Grey which had been a big hit for Gainsborough and on which Crabtree had been the cinematographer. Madonna of the Seven Moons was his first effort as a director, both a reward for past services and a concession to wartime scarcity. Crabtree's pedestrian direction is the weakest aspect of the film. The lighting looks good, but the choreography of sequences is stilted. Even when he tries something relatively outlandish, a circle dolly around Angela after she has been slipped a mickey, it has little impact or emotional heft. The film's Carnival in Florence is especially feeble compared to similar sequences in Sternberg's films. The ludicrous script could only have been brought to fruition by a director with the audacity of a Sternberg, Hitchcock or Buñuel. Instead, what we have is an enjoyably bad movie.