Personal Affair

A schoolgirl disappears for three days after a frank conversation with the wife of the Latin master she admires. Her absence turns at once into rumour in the town, and suspicion falls on the teacher’s household. The film is less interested in the disappearance itself than in what the people left behind do to one another; marriage, reputation and the eyes of neighbours are all tested at once. The account neither clears nor condemns anybody, and shows that what is said in those three days cannot be taken back. Its tension comes not from a crime but from how the empty space gets filled. Gene Tierney and Leo Genn appear in Anthony Pelissier’s eighty two minute British film, completed in 1953.