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Wednesday, December 3, 2014

The Passionate Stranger (1957)

A handsome young Italian (Carlo Giustini) gets a job as a chauffeur to an invalid (Ralph Richardson) in a wheelchair and his wife (Margaret Leighton). The wife is a novelist and decides to use the chauffeur as a character in her book. When the chauffeur reads the manuscript, he gets the wrong idea and sets forth to make fiction a reality. The concept is quite intriguing actually. The film is split into two parts, a film within a film. The film is in B&W and a comedy but when the novel is acted out (about a third of the film), it's in color and quite very dramatic. The execution isn't all it should be however. Perhaps it's too subtle and there should be more of a difference between the two halves. Yes, the B&W segment is a comedy but it should have been even more satiric to contrast with the high melodrama of the novel section. The director Muriel Box, who co-wrote the screenplay with husband Sydney, needed a lighter touch both as a writer and a director. With the exception of Giustini who seems limited by his command of the English language, the cast does surprisingly well with the material as everybody gets to play two roles, each quite different from the other. For example, Patricia Dainton as the maid is quite sweet and wholesome in the B&W section but quite the flirty tart in the color section. This is one film that could definitely use a remake. With Marjorie Rhodes and Allan Cuthbertson.

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