Watch Madonna of the Seven Moons For Free

Too much of everything

Powerful

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

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.

Ah, those dear dead days beyond naivety ... when no one found it even a smidgen strange that in a film set entirely in Rome and Florence the entire cast spoke as if at the Hunt Ball in Cheltenham, when the make-up department didn't think it necessary to make Phyliis Calvert at least SEEM old enough to be the mother of Patricia Roc rather than her kid sister (there was, in fact, less than a year between them)when it didn't occur to anyone involved that berets are worn by men in France rather than Italy and ... oh well you get the picture. Poor Phyllis Calvert is so out of her depth as a feral knife-wielding, cigarette smoking gypsy-type wanton that the waters are above her head but probably Margaret Lockwood was working that week and Jean Kent was thought only fit for support. Stewart Granger is on hand doing his usual 'it's all about ME, screw the picture' bit and a bemused time is had by all.

Gainsborough Pictures is probably most famous for the wide variety of melodramatic romantic (often costume) dramas it produced in the heydays of the 1940's. MADONNA OF THE SEVEN MOONS (1945) is one of the strangest, kinkiest examples of Gainsborough melodrama, yet it is also, despite it's wild, unbelievable melodrama, quite a finely made film and a very entertaining one at that.The film concerns the highly implausible premise of a woman, Maddelena (Phyllis Calvert)Labardi, having completely split identities. For long periods she is the married, repressed English lady, complete with clipped vowels and high collars. Her daughter Angela comes home from boarding school, and it is soon revealed that something is not quite right with her mother. She has strange spells of behavior where she appears to be somewhere completely different, reacts badly to Angela's modern dress and spirit, and faints at the sight of Sandro Barucci (Peter Glenville), one of Angela's friends invited for a party. Soon Maddelena becomes Rosanna, a gypsy woman who cavorts in the Florentine underbelly with her dark, handsome, devilish lover Nino Barucci (Stewart Granger).Calvert's complex character apparently has no idea of her illness, or her "other self" when she is either Maddelena or Rosanna. The only things that trigger awareness are religious symbols, the "seven moons" and set of jewelery. Angela and her fiancé soon venture to Florence to uncover the truth, and it of course ends in tragedy as Calvert's two identities catch up with and threaten one another.The idea of Phyllis Calvert, refined English leading lady and all, as an amnesiac posing as a free-living Italian gypsy girl is not as ridiculous as you may think. Calvert plays her dual roles very well, quite convincing as both the repressed upper-middle class housewife and the long-haired gypsy, alternately puffing on cigarettes and sexily cavorting with her thief lover Granger.Granger, who was Gainsborough's second most famous male lead after the great James Mason, does not have to do much else here apart from smolder and play a bit of a rough with Calvert in low-necked, sweaty shirts and carnival costumes. Granger was undoubtedly nowhere near as talented as the brooding, saturnine Mason who he had starred with in the "definitive" Gainsborough costume melodrama THE MAN IN GREY (1943), yet he is a strong screen presence regardless. Lovely Patricia Roc, often the second lead to Calvert or Margaret Lockwood (see THE WICKED LADY), is quite capable as the daughter, though it is a tad hard to buy the "mother-daughter" Clabert and Roc, as they were only separated by a few years at most.The set design and the production values are top-rate for a British studio in time of war. Of course the plotting is outlandish, but it's just so damn entertaining that many viewers can overlook the implausibility of the situation. As with most of the Gainsorough melodramas, a woman is the protagonist here, and we are led to believe that becoming the gypsy Rosannna is Calvert's attempt at transgressing a staid upper-class British society. The psychological premise of the plot is rather flimsily handled and barely explored, yet we are left with an interesting portrayal of a woman who, apparently raped by a gypsy when young, has no control over the competing sides of her personality.Above all, MADONNA OF THE SEVEN MOONS is great because it's just typical Gainsborough...melodrama, steamy love scenes (the reunion scene between Granger and Calvert is quite hot!), betrayal, murder, lust...see it!

*POSSIBLE SPOILERS*I saw this film during my Intro. to British Cinema class and I thought it was fantastic. Just like a great film does, I was hooked after 10 minutes and I never expected what happened to happen. This must have been a groud-breaking film for the time...hinting at a rape scene involving an older man and a young girl that leaves her mentally scarred for the rest of her life, a woman with double-personalities, lots of sexual undertones...If you haven't seen it, make sure you do. One of the best films I saw the past year.

This has got to be one of the most amazing movies I have ever seen. Not a dull moment to be had, and while it's not a thriller, it will certainly keep you on the edge of your seat. And boy are the love scenes steamy or what?? The only possible gripe is that it's extremely hard to believe that Miss Calvert could possibly have a daughter Miss Roc's age, and the casting is made even funnier when one knows the actual age difference between them (about 4 months), and has seen them act together in other movies where they play same-age friends, rather than inventing some non-existent 18 year age gap. Thus said, there truly would be no two women better suited to the roles, and they play their parts splendidly, with Phyllis Calvert expressing the mental anguish of her character's with such calibre that it certainly rivals Vivien Leigh's Blanche du Bois.