Rent So Evil My Love (1948)

Superb - So Evil My Love review by sb

FILM & REVIEW Aka So Evil My Love - wonderfully overraught Victorian melodrama has Todd as Olivia a recently widowed Missionary’s wife returning from Jamaica. On the ship she nurses Mark (Milland) who has had his own reasons to have left England and looks very shifty whenever there is a Policeman around. She inherits a small boarding house and he rents a room there and slowly an affair develops - but he has another girl on the go at the same time. He discovers that Olivia has a school friend (Fitzgerald) unhappily married to a rich barrister who has taken to drink and has a cache of letters to her one time lover. Mark persuades Olivia to renew the friendship and soon her unsuspecting husband hires Olivia to to look after his wife giving Mark the perfect opportunity for some good old fashioned blackmail - then things get seriously out of hand…. What’s supurb about it is that Milland is all suave rakish charm with a nasty dominating controlling side but it’s Todd as his all too willing partner in crime who goes from frumpy widow to full blown ice cold schemer that really shines. It’s all dialled up to eleven with wonderfully lit interiors shot at Denham and what’s interesting is that it’s set in London in the 1870’s but plays like a Film Noir of the 1940’s with its cynical take on relationships with blackmail leading to murder embedded - it’s a real undiscovered classic - 4/5