Ann Todd was once hailed as an “English Garbo,” and this moody romantic mystery makes the most of her enigmatic style. Todd plays Madeleine Smith, the center of a real-life murder case in Glasgow in 1857. Daughter of a respectable family, Madeleine spurns a blandly upstanding suitor in favor of a gaslight affair with oily, impoverished French dandy Emile (Ivan Desny). Like most of Lean's period dramas, this one hinges on questions of convention and class mobility: Madeleine is willing to sink, Emile wishes to rise, but propriety makes either impossible. So their relationship evolves from passion to conflict, from ravishment at a peasant dance to sinister suggestions in a basement. When the inconvenient Emile dies, is it suicide or murder? The film is resolute in its ambiguity to the end, when Madeleine meets the camera's gaze with what might almost be a smile.