Despite being an American citizen, and by birth on U.S. soil with two natural-born citizens as parents, the present administration’s obsession with deportation has me apprehensive of leaving the country, for fear I might not be allowed back in.  This may be needless worry, but I still thought of this when seeing how easily Ray MIlland’s fugitive is able to get off a schooner from Jamaica and into England in 1948’s So Evil My Love. Basically, it is the exact opposite of today’s border security. He doesn’t even have to take off his shoes.

Still, he looks awfully apprehensive of the police officers who board the ship when it docks. At the time the officers board, he had the good fortune to be in the midst of a conversation with “respectable” widow Ann Todd and so is able to turn away from their prying eyes.  She is also coming home from Jamaica, where she had been a missionary’s wife until he succumbed to malaria.  On the voyage home, she had tended to Milland for the same, though the captain had to beg her to do so.

This is the first sign that Todd is not as perfect as the surface might initially imply.  One would think she would be a charitable person, but she is actually rather selfish, and will become downright villainous by the end of the feature. 

The instigator for her gradual change is Milland, who finds where she lives, notes she has a sign up offering a room for let, and pleads poverty.  To prove he is an artist, he announces he will paint her portrait. This is a chaste yet smoldering scene, as he convinces her to literally let her hair down, which inevitably leads to her figuratively letting her hair down.  I found her initial reaction to the finished work odd, as she declares she never wants to see the results.  Who is she, a female Dorian Gray?  Yet she finally decides to look at it and is excited by what she sees, saying this is how she used to think of herself when she was a girl.

She’s not a girl anymore, and it is interesting to see a woman over 40 cast in this role, especially once she is fully under the sway of Milland.  Overcome by lust, she conspires to defraud, and then blackmail, childhood friend Geraldine Fitzgerald, who has since married wealthy barrister Raymond Huntley.  This is a pompous ass of a man who will likely be titled some day.

So, he definitely would not want certain letters sent by Fitzgerald to Todd to become public.  As Fitzpatrick puts it to her friend, there were things in that correspondence she didn’t really mean, things which concern her dalliances with Roderick Lovell.  Todd’s duplicity extends to setting up a “chance” meeting where Fitzpatrick will run in Lovell.  Given Todd already has eight incriminating letters, I’m not sure what she intended to accomplish by this.  Maybe she is just that cruel.

Todd already didn’t have any qualms about passing along to MIlland some bonds which are among the few items of value Fitzpatrick can truly call her own.  Tellingly, Milland understates the amount he sold them for by 200 pounds when informing her of the sale.

 

When their scheming escalates to blackmail, Todd finds the strength to dictate the terms to Huntley.  It is obvious she enjoys it.  As she tells Milland when riding away in a carriage afterwards: “I had the whip hand and he knew it.  I was completely in command.”  In this moment, she reminded me a bit of Brenda de Banzie’s headstrong character in Hobson’s Choice, but only if I mentally spin that to make her diabolically evil.

She is even more sure of herself in that instant than Milland is of himself at times.  His is a slippery character, to the extent I don’t believe we ever learn to his true name.  Moira Lister, as his secret lover the entire time he is with Todd, wishes he would settle on a better one than his present pseudonym of “Mark”.  That her character’s name is Kitty Feathers says everything you need to know about her, and possibly even wonder why she also doesn’t choose a different alias.  To my surprise, he admits to his own astonishment he may be in love with Todd when he is challenged on the matter by Lister, and yet: “I’m afraid of emotions I don’t trust.”

Todd, at least, isn’t afraid of her emotions and she immediately succumbs to a passion for Milland.  Honestly, her intensity is flat-out creepy at times, such as when she tells him: “Nothing is going to take you from me.  Nothing!”  I was wondering what she might resort to in order to keep him and I wouldn’t rule out hobbling.

Instead, the extremity of her scheming will be the murder of Huntley.  This is completely expected, though later in the runtime than I anticipated.  There was an earlier scene where she treats him when he is suddenly bedridden, and she does this using a medicine she was taught how to prepare by the natives of Jamaica.  We don’t see a label on the bottle, but I like to think the contents were curare, and that she just put her thumb over the “a” and “r”.  “You see, this will fix you right up.  It’s even called ‘cure’!”

The actual murder which happens later is so carefully staged that it is isn’t even Todd who administers a poison to him.  She only put some in that same bottle and then she manipulates Fitzgerald into spooning it to her husband.  Unfortunately for Fitzgerald, she had already been loudly moaning with guilt, believing she had somehow willed her husband to die.

The rest of the picture has Todd wrestling with her conscience as Fitzgerald is in prison and waiting to be hanged.  Milland, on the other hand, is only concerned with saving his own skin by getting out of the country.  The only question is whether he will be leaving with Todd or Lister.

The performances are strong all around.  Milland relishes the opportunity to play the cad.  Huntley is a character so reprehensible that I was rooting for his demise much earlier than I think the film even expects a viewer to.  Consider this line of his when he catches his wife covertly imbibing: “I’ve come to expect so very little of you.”  If there is one decent character in the picture, it is Fitzgerald, and she does memorable job of portraying a high-strung woman trapped in a loveless marriage.

An odd aside about Fitzgerald, she was the mother of Michael Lindsay-Hogg, director of , among other things, The Beatles’s Let It Be / Get Back. I learned this in yet another top-notch commentary by Imogen Sara Smith. She also passes along the rumor he may have been the illegitimate son of Orson Welles, and there is a startling resemblance.

But this is entirely a showcase for Todd, and I’m honestly not sure I’m completely sold on every minute of her performance.  There are subtleties I can appreciate in moments where there is an obvious disparity between something she is saying and what she is actually thinking.  Unfortunately, there are awkward incidents where she somehow seems to be simultaneously cunning and rather dense.  For example, in a moment where Milland is so insistent on talking about her friend’s valuable bonds, does Todd really not know why he is interested in those or is she deliberately being obtuse?

It is easy to think of her as being a femme fatale and that, despite being set in Victorian-era London, this is a noir.  I found it interesting her character goes from to being unpleasantly prim to being outwardly evil, and we believe that progression through her relationship with Milland.  But even he has some scruples, as a painter who shies away from ready money that could come from painting forgeries.  Todd will eventually have no such restrictions.   When he playfully asks her if she is struggling with her scruples, she admits, “No, we’re past that now.”

Dir: Lewis Allen

Starring Ray Milland, Ann Todd, Geraldine Fitzgerald

Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray