The Woman in the Hall(1947)
10/27/1947 (US)Drama1h 33m
6.0
"Jean Simmons, Great Star of "Hamlet" and "Great Expectations" in a Thrilling New Role!"
Overview
Lorna Blake, (Ursula Jeans) is a widow with two daughters. She augments her slender income by using her children to extort money - visiting the houses of the rich to tell a pathetic story and beg for help. And Lorna makes a rich capture when Sir Halmar Bernard, (Cecil Parker), proposes to her. She tells him that she has only one daughter, Molly (Jill Freud, credited as Jill Raymond). When her other daughter, Jay (Jean Simmons), is arrested for forging a cheque, she refuses to help her.
Jack Lee
Director
G.B. Stern
Screenplay
Jack Lee
Screenplay
Ian Dalrymple
Screenplay
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A review by CinemaSerf
6.0
Written on July 7, 2022
It is quite unusual to find Ursula Jeans in a leading role, and she does it rather well in this rather twisted story of a women who makes her way in life by lying and deceit. She must raise her two daughters, and does so by various means of extortion and malversation. As her daughters grow up, they cannot distinguish between right or wrong, nor truth and lie - so when Jeans finally dupes poor old Cecil Parker into marriage, the years of dishonesty and duplicitousness finally begin to catch up with them all. Jean Simmons and Jill Freud are both competent as the daughters - Simmons (only 18 here) has yet to quite work out how to own the camera in the way she later became natural at - and the eagle eyed might spot a very early outing from Susan Hampshire. The story has it's moments, but it does drag rather - and the lack of any characters with whom we might empathise (save for Jeans' constant flow of gullibles) brings a certain "who cares" to the story... It is a well made piece of cinema, though - just nothing particularly noteworthy.
