The name is absent

Appendix 3.2: Sample films - synopses and character lists

BRIEF ENCOUNTER UK 45

MADONNA OF THE SEVEN MOONS dir Crabtree UK 1944

The film is set in Italy, in Rome and Florence, and concerns
two different social groups: the rich upper middle class and
the petty criminal∕peasant community. The period is ambiguous
- there is much emphasis on the different customs of past and
present, the ^,old^, and the 'new^, worlds, and the film is
firmly placed in the modern world, yet there is no mention of
the war so it must be understood as set in the 1930s.

The story centres on a woman, Maddalena played by Phyllis
Calvert, who is married to a wealthy man and has a young adult
daughter Angela, played by Patricia Roc. It opens with a scene
of Maddalena’s (suggested) rape just before she leaves her
convent school to marry a wealthy man chosen by her father.
The story then flashes forward twenty years, to find Maddalena
and her husband Giuseppe awaiting the arrival of their
daughter who has just finished school in England. As the
narrative unfolds we learn that Maddalena is unstable, given
to moments of unaccountable panic and periodic disappearances.
We follow her on one such disappearance and into her other
life: here she is Rosanna, the lover of Nino (Stewart
Granger), leader of a gang of small time criminals living in
the poor and crowded, though picturesque, back alleys of
Florence. Thus the audience is in a position of superior
knowledge since neither the woman herself, nor either of her
two ’families’ knows that she has occupied two different
persona during her adult life. Suspense is constructed as the
two lives gradually converge through the interactions of
Angela, Nino's brother Sandro, and an English painter, Jimmy,
given to plein air sketching in the picturesque back alleys.
The denouement, on carnival night in Florence, leads to
Maddalena/Rosanna's death and the revelation of her history.
The authoritative medical voice of the family doctor and

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