David Lean made Madeleine for his latest new wife – Ann Todd was number three of six. She’d played notorious murderer Madeleine Smith on stage and wanted her performance captured for posterity. The result was a good film, she thought; the great director thought it his worst. Having just watched it, I reckon Todd gets it about right and Lean is being harsh.
One thing is obviously completely wrong about Todd though. At 43, she’s just way too old to be playing a young woman. It’s the sort of thing you might get away with on stage but not on camera. And yet, having said that, Todd does OK, busking through on acting prowess.
The age does still rankle though. It matters because this is the story of a young woman from a stiff and well-to-do family in 19th-century Glasgow being courted by a Frenchman from the lower orders. Émile (Ivan Desny), is handsome and lusty. As they meet in secret, it’s obvious that the basis of their relationship is largely sexual and that they’ve slept together. Émile believes, probably wrongly, that one day he’ll be formally introduced to Madeleine’s father (Leslie Banks) and, with that technicality out of the way, marriage will follow as night follows day.
That is the situation as the curtain metaphorically rises – Émile trying to get a foot in the door, Madeleine fending him off, possibly because she’s beginning to realise the whole affair has been transactional. She wanted Émile’s body and he, if he were being honest, wanted her money.
And then William Minnoch (Norman Wooland) arrives on the scene. A new suitor for Madeleine, one who is decent and patient and rich. And, crucially, allowed inside the family home.
Émile responds with fiery French passion, threatening to reveal Madeleine’s steamy love letters. Madeleine retaliates with perfidious British calm, and decides to kill Émile with poison.
The case was famous because it had all the ingredients of a good newspaper story – gender roles reversed, sex, money, a foreigner, passion, poison and an opportunity to put a thumb on the scale of justice with a cascade of whataboutery. In the newspapers’ reckoning, Émile is guilty – of being foreign, of not knowing his place and of having turned the head of an impressionable young woman (Todd’s age does matter here). The fact that it’s Madeleine who is eventually on trial for murder is immaterial.
What sort of woman is Madeleine though? Silly, sex-crazed, deranged, a victim or a perpetrator? Todd’s playing of her is excellent – we can read Madeleine in so many ways, though there is no doubt about the poisoning. We see her go into a chemist’s shop to buy prussic acid. When that doesn’t quite do the trick she follows up with arsenic.
There is a lot of good stuff here. Ivan Desny looks a touch like a young Orson Welles, which prompts Lean to go in for some Wellesian pastiche with deep-focus cinematography in the film’s most dramatic moments. In fact the film looks spectacular throughout, thanks to the high-contrast lighting by Guy Green, who’d done both Great Expectations and Oliver Twist for Lean, two triumphs of monochrome cinematography.
Lean uses weather as an avatar for the soul, the relentless mist and rain suggesting moral corruption and foreboding. Towards the end he pulls off some majestic moments of economic storytelling. The scene where Madeleine is taken to court while a crowd bays for her blood outside – conveyed with nothing more than Todd inside a coach that’s being rocked back and forth by the crew. Best of all the trial scene, where the counsel for the prosecution and defence (André Morell and Barry Jones) sum up their cases while Lean flashes back over events.
They are erudite, too, the bewigged barristers, adding another reason to watch.
If you’ve seen Letty Lynton, the Joan Crawford movie from 1931 about the same case (it’s just been restored – review coming soon), then you’ve seen the same story done in a completely different way. Both understand that, at some level, it’s gender that’s on trial and that Madeleine is guilty of wanting what a man wants. Both are good.
Madeleine – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
