It's all about love, the deadliest thing in the world, constantly causing suicides and billions of fatal heartbreaks. Here is another slant on this timeless eternal predicament - the most impossible thinkable love affair on only one side by a student of her teacher, and he doesn't even know it. Her crush leads to typically womanish oversensitive caprices, which in their turn cause avalanches of complications, totally unintended, of course, - but the most precarious thing about love is that it is always irresponsible when it is true. The victims simply can't be held responsible for their feelings or their consequences. Pamela Brown plays the opposite case - she has killed her feelings, she sees everything perfectly coldly, like a scientist dissecting or using live animals in a laboratory, she thinks she knows and controls everything and sees everything clearly, but she knows nothing, because she feels nothing. Having killed her love, she is dead, and if she steps in to meddle in a love case, she can only cause further damage.
It's a drama of extremely high tension, almost like one of the most unendurable thrillers by Hitchcock, and it is marvellously filmed at that, with William Alwyn's tremendous music, the innovative cinematography making the dramatic cascades play an important part as an ominous accompaniment to the high tension drama. Glynis Johns as a seventeen year old girl is just that and couldn't be one year older - this must be one of her best performances, although they are so many. And Gene Tierney is more beautiful than ever as the ideal wife - of Leo Genn, always a marvel of a safe character on screen, especially memorable as the doctor in "The Snakepit". This is truly a gem of highest psychological and human calibre, and it's perfectly natural if you want to cry your eyes out.
It's a drama of extremely high tension, almost like one of the most unendurable thrillers by Hitchcock, and it is marvellously filmed at that, with William Alwyn's tremendous music, the innovative cinematography making the dramatic cascades play an important part as an ominous accompaniment to the high tension drama. Glynis Johns as a seventeen year old girl is just that and couldn't be one year older - this must be one of her best performances, although they are so many. And Gene Tierney is more beautiful than ever as the ideal wife - of Leo Genn, always a marvel of a safe character on screen, especially memorable as the doctor in "The Snakepit". This is truly a gem of highest psychological and human calibre, and it's perfectly natural if you want to cry your eyes out.