Seventh Sin, The (1957)
The Seventh Sin (1957), directed by Ronald Neame.
When a doctor's wife is caught having an affair she explains that she doesn't love or respect her husband and that she objects to the way he has accepted all of her excuses for not having sex. Apparently a more manly man would have insisted on getting what he wanted.
As revenge, the doctor takes her hundreds of miles inland where he will be fighting a cholera outbreak. Will this fix anything, or just solve it by ending everything?
It's not a great film and the acting drifts between histrionic soap opera emoting and more subdued emotions. Its points of interest:
Eleanor Parker! I can't help it, she's fascinating.
It has literary origins in a W. Somerset Maugham novel, made previously under its own name with Greta Garbo and Herbert Marshall in The Painted Veil (1934) and again with Naomi Watts and Edward Norton in The Painted Veil (2006).
George Sanders gets a rare nice-guy role, although he doesn't let on at first.
It closely tracks the book, omitting the final acts when she returns to Hong Kong and then to England. A sobering point from the text: the children at the orphanage were all girls because the Sisters had bought them from parents who would have killed them otherwise.
The movie really doesn't need to be in scope ratio. Although labeled as CinemaScope, it was a cheaper process using standard spherical 35mm film zoomed and distributed as anamorphic prints.
Miklós Rózsa provides his usual tempestuous, lyrical score.
Ronald Neame gets directing credit but at some point he was fired and the film was completed by Vincente Minnelli.
Warner Archive DVD with a soft image.
