Madness of the Heart

There’s a scene in Charles Bennett’s Madness of the Heart in which a young novice is advised by her Mother Superior to leave the convent because religious life is not her true calling. It unmistakably presages the story arc of Robert Wise’s 1960 The Sound of Music; instead of “Climb every mountain,” the elder nun’s inspirational advice is “Seek and you shall find.” While the films share a romantic premise with a vulnerable British heroine and an opening scene featuring nuns singing inside a convent (in this case, Mozart’s brilliant “Mass in C Minor”), Bennett’s film adds a Gothic sheen and pivots to noir darkness in the second half. The novice is Lydia Garth (Margaret Lockwood), whose religious pursuit fizzles when she falls in love with French nobleman Paul de Vandiere (Paul Dupuis). The couple’s newfound paradise is disrupted by two obstacles: Lydia’s sudden onset of blindness and the enmity of Vandiere’s neighbor, Verite Faimont (Kathleen Byron, fresh off her iconic role as the psychotic nun in Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 Black Narcissus), who wants Vandiere and his fortune all to herself. While Lydia’s disability places her in danger (the cruelty of the drowning attempt may remind noir fans of John M. Stahl’s 1945 Leave Her to Heaven), it will ultimately save her from the evil forces skulking about. The film has a certain pull to it even if the “newly married girl unwelcome in new husband’s mansion” device has been used far more successfully and satisfyingly both before and after this attempt.