A Woman's Vengeance

When a sick wife dies of poisoning, the prime suspect is the husband, whose affair with a younger woman comes to light. Other possibilities are in the air: a woman who has loved him from a distance for years, and suicide. Zoltan Korda’s film starts as a murder puzzle and puts its real weight on capital punishment, leaving the question of whether the convicted man actually did it open until the last moment. Aldous Huxley wrote the screenplay from his own 1922 story The Gioconda Smile, so the adaptation is the author’s own. Charles Boyer plays the husband, Ann Blyth the younger woman and Jessica Tandy the one who loves from a distance, with Cedric Hardwicke and Mildred Natwick alongside. Universal produced it. The record’s cast list holds six names at most, and Rachel Kempson, who plays the wife who dies, is not among them.