The Astonished Heart *** (1950, Celia Johnson, Noël Coward, Margaret Leighton, Graham Payn, Joyce Carey) – Classic Movie Review 3049

One of Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8:30 collection of 10 short plays (like Still Life that became Brief Encounter) looks thin and exposed in director Terence Fisher’s poorly directed, sluggish 1950 screen version. It fails to ignite but nevertheless the actors and their performances save it.

It’s certainly not the fault of the piece itself, which is a fine piece of work and still very moving as the 1991 TV version with John Alderton, Joan Collins and Siân Phillips amply demonstrated.

On the acting front the 1950 version couldn’t be better cast than with Coward himself as the obsessed psychiatrist allowed by his wife (Celia Johnson) to fall in love with her good-time girl school-friend (Margaret Leighton) and go on a world tour together. The psychiatrist quotes Deuteronomy 28, Verse 28: ‘The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and admonishment of heart’, suggesting his resulting tragedy and prompting the piece’s title.

Coward’s real-life life partner Graham Payn and close friend Joyce Carey lead the choice star support. Also in the cast are Ralph Michael, Michael Hordern, Amy Veness, Everley Gregg, Patricia Glyn, Alan Webb, John Salew, Gerald Anderson, John Warren and Mary Ellis. And everybody is quite delightful. It must also help that Coward again writes his own screenplay as he did with Brief Encounter.

The advertised ‘daring experiment in love’ met with indifferent reviews and was a commercial failure, failing to be the expected follow-up to the triumphant Brief Encounter. I bet Coward was thrilled to bits to read in The New York Times: ‘Mr. Coward is capable of doing better.’

Johnson, Carey and Gregg were of course all memorable in Coward’s Brief Encounter. After Coward’s death in 1973, Payn ran the Coward Estate for 22 years. He lived in their home in Switzerland, where he died in 2005, aged 87.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3049

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Graham Payn with Mary Martin in the show Pacific 1860.