Apart from the fact that they were all British films made during the 1940s, what do "Dangerous Moonlight", "The Glass Mountain" and "While I Live" have in common? One answer is that all three films feature a piece of music which today is far better known than the film itself- Richard Addinsell's "Warsaw Concerto", Nino Rota's "The Legend of the Glass Mountain" and Charles Williams' "The Dream of Olwen".
Another answer might be that all three films also feature a composer as one of the main characters. I would regard the composer in "While I Live", a young woman named Olwen Trevelyan, as a major character, even though she dies near the beginning of the film. One night in 1922 Olwen, who has been struggling to complete her latest composition, falls to her death from a cliff near her home in Cornwall.
The rest of the action takes place in 1947, the year the film was made. The house is now occupied by Olwen's elder sister Julia, their cousin Peter, his wife Christine and a few servants. Julia has become a gloomy, reclusive figure, obsessed with the memory of her late sister; the house has become a virtual shrine to Olwen. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of her death her final composition, completed by another composer and given the title "The Dream of Olwen", is broadcast on the radio in a special memorial concert.
While Julia and her household are listening to the broadcast, an unknown young woman enters the house. She claims to have lost her memory and to have no idea of who she is, but she is a gifted pianist and has a surprisingly detailed knowledge of Olwen's life and of the Trevelyan family. Julia becomes convinced that the girl is, in some sense, Olwen come back to her. She does not believe this in the strictly literal sense- even if the real Olwen had somehow managed to survive her fall from the cliff she would have been middle-aged in 1947, much older than this girl who is still in her twenties. Nevertheless, Julia becomes obsessed by the idea that this woman is the reincarnation of her dead sister or the embodiment of her spirit.
Some reviewers have made the point that during, and in the years immediately following, the Second World War, there was a revival of interest in spiritualism in Britain, just as there had during and after the First. That may be true in itself, but the point is not relevant to this film, which offers little support to the spiritualist cause. The only vaguely "supernatural" element in the drama is the figure of Julia's elderly manservant Nehemiah, who seems to have some sort of ability as a faith healer, but for the film's central mystery there is a perfectly rational explanation. Julia's ideas about reincarnation are shown to be not only wrong but dangerously so. They are dangerous in that they lead to a family rift between Julia and Christine, who has no time for what she sees as Julia's crazy notions, and in that for a time they prevent the young woman, whose real name is Sally Grant, from receiving the medical help she needs.
Some have complained that the film is excessively melodramatic and that the cast are guilty of overacting. There is some justice in this charge, the worst offender being Tom Walls as Nehemiah, whom he plays as a sort of cross between a stage yokel and Merlin the wizard, complete with his ripest stage Mummerset accent. ("Ooh arr, oi be jest a zimple Carnishman
.."). Sonia Dresdel seems to go almost as far over the top, although in her defence it could be said that it would be difficult to play the half-crazy Julia in any other way. Overacting seemed to be an occupational disease in the British cinema of the forties; there was another outbreak in "Madonna of the Seven Moons", another film about an amnesiac woman made a couple of years before this one.
Of the three films I mentioned in my opening paragraph, this one is, for all its occasional absurdities, probably the best. Were it not for its music, Dangerous Moonlight" would have been no more than a dull wartime propaganda movie, and if "While I Live" is overacted, "The Glass Mountain" is a prime example of the opposite sin, that of underacting, with the whole cast (apart from the Italian-born Valentina Cortese) keeping the stiffest of upper lips even when they are supposed to be in the throes of strong emotion. (Some directors seemed to find it difficult to steer a middle course between the two extremes). At least "While I Live" offers us an unusual story, with characters one can identify with and care about. Julia's ideas may be dangerously wrong, but we can nevertheless sympathise with her anguish over the premature death of her brilliant and beloved younger sister. 6/10- 5/10 for the film, with a bonus point for the music. And had the scriptwriters rewritten the story to get rid of Nehemiah, that mark might well have been higher.
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