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Fantastic!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Blistering performances.

"A Woman's Vengeance" is unusual in that it was written by Aldous Huxley, they author of the brilliant "Brave New World" and the son of the famous evolutionist, Thomas Henry Huxley. I had no idea he wrote this sort of story...a murder mystery.When the story begins, Henry (Charles Boyer) and his wife, Emily, are having a fight. It seems that Emily is a very histrionic and demanding woman...the sort that would be nearly impossible to love. On the other hand, Henry isn't exactly an angel...he's got a VERY young girlfriend (Ann Blythe) on the side. He also has a family friend, Janet (Jessica Tandy), who loves him.One day after yet another fight brought on by Emily, Henry goes out to spend the day with his mistress. During this time period, Emily dies of a heart attack...thus freeing Henry to marry his girlfriend. But once he does, Janet and, especially, the family's maid (Mildred Natwick) begin to wonder if Emily died a natural death. Soon, there is an exhumation and it's determined that Emily was poisoned!! Did Henry do it? After all, he clearly had the most to gain and any man married to Emily would be likely to at least consider poisoning her! Or is there some other answer?The story is greatly helped by its cast. It's easy to make a good film with the likes of Charles Boyer, Jessica Tandy, Mildred Natwick, John Williams and Cederic Hardwicke in a movie...and it's obvious Universal Pictures put a lot of money into the production.It's also helped that the story is so clever and offers some interesting twists. I also appreciate that the characters are quite flawed...much like many real people. Overall, well worth seeing and wonderfully well acted.

... for example it would be a bummer if "Star Wars" (SPOILER WARNING FOR ANYBODY LIVING ON A DESERT ISLAND THE LAST FORTY YEARS) had been named "My Trouble with Dad who Dresses in Black and uses Black Magic a Tad". Yet there is some mystery until about 2/3 of the way into the film, and at that point it is just very good acting that carries the day.Wealthy Henry Maurier (Charles Boyer) has an invalid wife, Emily (Rachel Kempson). And Emily whines about her condition, whines about her husband wishing she were dead, and apparently, from what Henry says, was not great companionship when she was well. Emily perhaps is picking up on the fact that Henry has an 18 year old mistress, Doris (Ann Blythe), who is getting impatient being just the mistress and being hidden away. The Mauriers also have a family friend, Janet Spence (Jessica Tandy), who is 35 and has remained unmarried all of these years taking care of her invalid dad, although she never sounds as though she thinks he is a burden. Henry finds great intellectual companionship with Janet as they talk over art, music, and literature. Henry has a problem relative in Emily's brother, who is constantly sponging off of Emily, or at least trying to. Henry intercepts him at every opportunity and tears up any checks Emily writes him.One night Henry breaks his own rule and takes Doris out in public, only for Emily's brother to see them together. He blackmails Henry for 500 dollars which he says he will collect the next morning or he will tell Emily all about it. But that is one check he will never collect, because when Henry returns home that night he learns that his wife died of a heart attack earlier in the evening. The maid is blamed for serving Emily red currants rather than the bland diet the doctor prescribed, thus upsetting her delicate system and bringing on the fatal attack.Henry's wealth must be inherited, because he has no patience or prudence. He marries Doris before Emily is cold and takes to redecorating the house to his new wife's liking. The maid, brilliantly played by Mildred Natwick, begins to suspect that maybe Emily was murdered rather than just dying of some random heart attack. Plus she is resenting being blamed for Emily's death. An autopsy is performed and arsenic is found in her system. So, who did it? Everyone thinks Henry did, and the new hot young wife, a mistress while his wife was still living, does not help any. But from the title we know a woman did it. But which one? The maid for being promised things by Emily she knew she would never receive? The new wife for getting tired of waiting for Henry to marry her? Janet for perhaps thinking that Henry cared for her only to be supplanted by someone half her age? Or maybe Emily herself, who may have known more than she was telling and wanted to end her own suffering and point the finger of guilt at Henry at the same time? Well, watch and find out, as Sir Cedric Hardwicke as the doctor cleverly unravels the whole thing like some sexagenarian protagonist from an 80s TV mystery show. This is one of Boyer's most likable roles, even if he is a two faced adulterer here. That says something for his acting (and his roles).

Ah, English country life – all revenge killings and red-currant fool. That's the fate that conveniently befalls Rachel Kempson, the irritating invalid spouse to squire Charles Boyer. It's convenient for him, because the lid's just been torn off his affair with his teen-aged mistress (Ann Blythe), with whom he was whiling away the evening as the bell tolled for his lawfully wedded wife.At first, the demise of that royal pain causes a general sigh of relief. It leaves Boyer free to marry Blythe, which he does; it also left him free, in the view of neighbor and intimate family friend Jessica Tandy, to marry her, which he did not. When a trouble-making nurse (Mildred Natwick), outraged by Boyer's extramarital carryings-on, goes to the police, an autopsy proves her suspicions correct: The sudden death, at first though to have a heart attack brought on by those beastly berries, turns out to be poisoning by arsenic found in weed killer. Inquest, trial and death sentence all go badly for Boyer, who awaits the scaffold claiming his innocence. It sounds like an Agatha Christie country-house mystery – genteel homicide between rubbers of Bridge – but it's a bit more than that. Aldous Huxley wrote the script, from his story The Gioconda Smile, and he's less interested in the logistics of murder than its psychology. Today, he's remembered chiefly as author of Brave New World and as an apostle of LSD. But he was one of the more thoughtful and inquisitive popular novelists of his time, holding the sort of position Gore Vidal does today, and, like Vidal, found Southern California and The Industry congenial for living and working. He was lucky to get a director (Zoltan Korda) and a cast this good. Boyer breaks free from the debonair malevolence that, following the success of Gaslight, so often shackled him, and Blythe starts out recycling her Veda Pierce but finally realizes that this is a new role. Tandy, fresh from creating Blanche DuBois on Broadway, tackles her part – a lovesick spinster of 35 – cautiously at first, then deepens and underscores what turns out to be the movie's central role. There's a strikingly composed scene in which her face is severely framed in a high aperture overlooking Boyer's death cell when she unleashes her pent-up frustration, and Tandy does it full justice. Acting honors, however, go to Cedric Hardwicke, family physician turned psychoanalyst and father-confessor, who steals every scene simply by off-handedly underplaying. A Woman's Vengance is a Hollywood product so skillfully put together that its multi-national cast needs no cumbersome explication. It's literate, verging on the sedate, keeping attention though subtle shifts rather than clamorous developments. In its sense of the malice festering under a cultivated facade of manners, A Woman's Vengeance calls to mind another country-house movie of the same year, Sign of the Ram.

A wonderful film with a marvelous cast and brilliantly written screenplay. This film superbly captures the anguish of unrequited love and how it transforms its victims into wrong-doers.