User reviews

"The Deep Blue Sea" represents a notable staple in the film repertoire of Vivien Leigh. Given the enormous popularity and artistic achievements of this consummate British actress, it seems incredible that this film is not available on video. She is always fascinating to watch, and this drama about marital difficulties provides her with a good "modern day" role, compared to her many period/costume pieces. She is beautiful, skillful, and intelligent in her approach to and realization of her characters, and all are evident in this sensibly presented drama. Her co-star, Kenneth More, is professional as always; Eric Portman gives his usual strong character support; and the appearance of Emlyn Williams is a special bonus. The film needs to be seen on the big screen in CinemaScope to get its maximum impact. It deserves to be revived, and more importantly, made available on video.

For a while it looked as though the BFI's Vivien Leigh season would be without "The Deep Blue Sea". As others have noted here, it's been unavailable for many years. Programme notes revealed that the BFI has a single 35mm print in its archive - with faded colour, sound damage in the first and last reels, and many splices. Nothing better could be located anywhere in the world. The BFI digitised the print and this was shown tonight to a sold-out house seemingly well aware this may be the only chance to see the film on the big screen. It looked better than anticipated. The performances are excellent. Incidentally, whoever said the film is "stagebound" can't have seen it since 1955. Rattigan's play has been cleverly opened out with flashbacks, many locations (among them an air show, Klosters, and the London Embankment) and several big studio sets including a law court, bars and pubs, and a huge recreation of London's Soho. I didn't have a pen and and have now forgotten many of the uncredited actors. But they include Frederick Schiller, Gerald Campion, Jacqueline Cox, Shandra (later Sandra)Walden, Amanda Coxell (later Mandy Harper),Patricia Hayes, Raymond Francis and John Boxer.

Terrence Rattigan's play was a popular success in London, tho not in the NY production that starred Margaret Sullavan. There were two revivals last year, one in London and one in NY, starring Blythe Danner. Although the movie is boxy and stagebound, it does preserve one of Rattigan's most entrancing creations, Hester Collyer (Vivien Leigh), a woman all at once rabid with latent sexual desire and without remorse or ounce of self-pity for her choices. The performance more than meets the requirement that Hester should never be viewed as either sordid or immoral. Listen, this is the early 50s.

Rattigan's closest American playwright kin was William Inge. Like Inge, he favored characters tormented with issues out of sexual repression and the price they paid for what society, then, viewed as their *sins.* Like Inge, Rattigan was homosexual and often used his characters to illuminate his own dark closet. A video transfer is desperately needed.

After watching the Terence Rattigan DVD collection (with most of the adaptations being from the 70s and 80s) when staying with family friends last year, Rattigan very quickly became one of my favourite playwrights and he still is. His dialogue is so intelligent, witty and meaty, his characterisation so dynamic, complex and real and the storytelling so beautifully constructed.

'The Deep Blue Sea' may not be among my favourite Rattigan plays ('The Browning Version', 'The Winslow Boy', 'Separate Tables'), but it's still wonderful and distinctively Rattigan. The writing is 24-carat Rattigan and the story is timeless in its searing emotion and romantic passion. It's very sharply observant and emotionally searing. This rarely viewed and as of now unavailable film version of 'The Deep Blue Sea' is deserving of more exposure.

It may not be one of the best representations of Rattigan in general (i.e. 1951's 'The Browning Version', 1948's 'The Winslow Boy' and 1958's 'Separate Tables'), but it is as good an adaptation of 'The Deep Blue Sea' as can suffice (not the best but one of them). It is a shame that it is unavailable on DVD and can as of now only be viewed in a rather poor print on Youtube. If and when available on DVD, while it's not perfect it deserves to be, it needs to be a restoration. It is a shame that it got a tepid response when released, it is understandable in a way that it didn't connect with viewers considering the film competition that year and that it was considered too cold, talky and sedate at the time and perhaps the subject was a little inaccessible to some at the time.

With that being said, 'The Deep Blue Sea' is still well worth the viewing. Mainly for seeing Kenneth More in one of his best performances (he is brilliant here), Vivien Leigh in an achingly personal performance (that sees her as beautiful, but not too beautiful, and to me she wasn't too cold) and the two of them together in a pretty passionate chemistry (do disagree respectfully with More himself that it was poor) that contrasts well with the suitably passionless one for Hester's marriage as it should be. Plus a sterling, distinguished supporting cast with Eric Portman and Emlyn Williams being the standouts. The only exception with the latter is Jimmy Hanley, who is a little wooden.

Malcolm Arnold's music score is understated but swells passionately at the right moments. The script is thought-provoking and observant, with the wit and nuances captured well even with changes, there is a lot of talk but that is the case with the play itself and Rattigan in general. The story may not be as searing as with the play and may lack its intimacy in places, but the characters, the meaty way they're written and their stories are handled quite well.

Anatole Litvak's direction could have been more expansive, other film adaptations of Rattigan's work have done a better job of opening up their respective source material and even extending it, and although it is an intimate story the direction is a little too sedate and self-contained. 'The Deep Blue Sea' has been criticised for substandard production values, to me the settings and costumes are lovely to look at and some of the film is atmospherically lit but it is let down by the poor print with the faded and grainy picture quality and less than lavish and at times incomplete looking photography.

Overall, underviewed film that despite its faults is interesting and worth the watch. 7/10 Bethany Cox

After her second Oscar in Streetcar Named Desire Vivien Leigh made only three more films and in all of them she played older women who are hungering for love. Hardly the image of the saucy Scarlett O'Hara which she won her first Oscar with, but it did allow her to transition into roles for older women. This one her in The Deep Blue Sea is way too uncomfortably close to her real life.

In this film it opens with her attempting suicide and being saved by prying neighbors. Her much younger second husband has left her and in flashbacks we learn what was going on. Vivien had been raised a prim and proper church girl with a country parson for a father. She learned the biblical view of sex that did not leave much room for later research into the field on a more clinical basis. She married the older and more settled Emlyn Williams who is a judge. But as they got older Emlyn got less interested in sex. Enter Kenneth More who was an RAF air ace and now a test pilot. That's real glamor for her and like Anna Karenina, another Leigh part she leaves Williams and runs off with More.

But More's got issues also, he's an alcoholic and deep down he's looking for a mother figure. Since she and Williams had no children, Leigh isn't recognizing this nor is she prepared to deal with it.

Terrence Ratigan adapted his own play to the screen and rather well since the play only takes place in Leigh's apartment. We get some scenes of London night life in 1955 and with More's job, part of the film takes place at an air show. On Broadway the play ran for 132 performances in 1952-53 and starred Margaret Sullavan.

Offering advice and counsel is defrocked psychiatrist Eric Portman who is a neighbor. But as Leigh finds out as does the audience there are no no easy answers.

The Deep Blue Sea is not as good a work from Ratigan as The Browning Version or Separate Tables. Still the cast performs well, especially Vivien Leigh who made very infrequent screen appearances now.

"Suicide is painless", the M. A. S. H. song announced, but Hester (played by a negative Vivien Leigh) is determined to commit suicide, beginning and ending the film on the verge of it.

I have long admired Ukrainian-born Director Anatole Litvak for his ability to bring emotional situations to the screen, and I am particularly fond of GOODBYE AGAIN and SNAKE PIT, but here the room where pretty much all the action unfolds has no view at all, other than suicide.

Perhaps the beautiful Vivien Leigh identified with Hester's plight because in reality she was a nymphomaniac bipolar schizophrenic who kept cheating husband Laurence Olivier with Peter Finch and a host of other men, and it fits that she might want to convey to all that she could only see suicide as the solution. Sad as that might be, she died in 1967 of chronic TB.

I watched a shabby, rather unfocused copy of this claustrophobic film on Youtube, which only rendered it bleaker, but I still liked Kenneth More's performance, a happy jobless golfer brimming with unconcerned humor and selfishness, Eric Portman as the horse race bookie apparently preparing medication for the quadruped competiitors who comes to her rescue, Emlyn Williams, as her ditched Old Bailey judge husband who still loves her but is shunned, Moira Lister as the gossipmonger of a neighbor, and other minor characters who you can see fitting into this play by Terence Rattigan.

Vivling, as Larry Olivier used to call his then wife, delivers a rather cold and helpless performance vaguely reminiscent of Blanche in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE but without the sympathetic touch and the deft direction of Kazan, and not even Jack Hildyard can save the film from unremitting hopelessness with his usually top notch cinematography, here reduced to pretty one living room, with the odd exterior shot.

All told, I can understand why the film rated a dud with critics when it came out. 6/10.

This film suffers from the lingering taint of tepid critical response upon its initial release, based largely on the facts that (1) Rattigan's original play was "opened up" (including a ski trip to Switzerland) and shot in CinemaScope and (2) that the beautiful and glamorous Vivien Leigh played a heroine created on stage by the talented but dowdy Peggy Ashcroft.

Leigh's performance was deemed cold - too controlled - yet she provides the cold fire, hot ice quality that always made her a fascinating film actress. More's performance as the lover was overrated - he won a prize at the Venice film festival, and made it plain that he and his co-star did not get along during filming, mainly because he protested Leigh's desire to look her best. Such a desire is all the more understandable given the fact that her last completed film was A Streetcar Named Desire, as the faded beauty Blanche, and that she had subsequently broken down during the filming of Elephant Walk and been replaced by the much younger Elizabeth Taylor.

There were dissenting critical opinions. Pauline Kael called Leigh's performance here "brilliant" when later reviewing The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and finding the Karen Stone performance wanting in contrast. (I beg to differ with Pauline on that point, being a Karen Stone enthusiast myself.) In any case, The Deep Blue Sea deserves to be seen. It was produced by Alexander Korda in Britain, but distributed by 20th Century Fox in the U.S.A., so maybe there are copyright issues blocking its release on video.

Here in America the film would seem a likely staple of the American Movie Classics cable station, if for no other reason because it stars the woman who played Scarlett O'Hara. (20th Century Fox CinemaScope films of the same vintage play regularly on the station, e.g., How To Marry a Millionaire, Three Coins in the Fountain, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, Anastasia, et al.) The critical success of David Mamet's adaptation of The Winslow Boy may stir interest in Rattigan once again - let's hope so.

The play itself was and remains a strong acting vehicle, especially for the woman who plays Hester. Faye Dunaway nearly did it in NYC for Roundabout, but somehow the star and the theater couldn't come to terms over contract demands, and it was revived instead with Blythe Danner (aka Ma Paltrow).

Let's hope that Vivien Leigh's performance will be available for viewing by movie fans and serious film and theater scholars alike in the near future. After all, she is one of the great actresses of the twentieth century cinema, and this is one of but eight films she made following Gone With the Wind.

An interesting footnote: Arthur Hill appears briefly in this film; later, when Vivien Leigh won a Tony Award for her performance in the Broadway musical Tovarich, Hill won the Tony for his dramatic turn in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. There is an amusing photograph of Leigh, Hill, and fellow winners Zero Mostel and Uta Hagen at the awards ceremony, circa 1963.

Vivien Leigh, in my opinion and that of many others as well, is one of the five or so greatest actresses ever in motion pictures. Poor physical health, mental health issues, and her personal preference for the stage resulted her making a regrettably small number of films, just nine after reaching icon status playing Scarlett O'Hara in GONE WITH THE WIND, four in the 1940's and just two in the 1950's and another two in the 1960's. Of these nine films, THE DEEP BLUE SEA was the least successful and it's astonishingly difficult to see, never airing on American cable channels despite moderately good reviews at the time of theatrical release. Perhaps it's a legal rites issue as it's based on a Terrence Rattigan play and many of the major playwrights had clauses in their contracts concerning distribution of a film past it's initial release. The movie is currently on youtube although in a mediocre print, particularly sad given this is one of just four color Vivien Leigh films.

Vivien plays Hester Collyer, longtime wife of a distingushed judge, whose life is thrown into upheaval by being pursued by a slightly younger test pilot Kenneth More. The Collyer marriage is one of comfort, security, and boredom and while she brushes off the initial advances, being pursued by a virile man two decades younger than her sedate husband is too much to fight and they eventually began an affair. When More is transferred to Canada, Vivien leaves her husband to be with him but before the year is up he's transferred again back to England. The couple rent an apartment together and feign being married. The film opens as Hester is discovered in a suicide attempt at the flat. The presumed catalyst being More forgot her birthday (!!) but clearly there's more to the story than that. More hits the roof when he discovers the birthday excuse and storms out, gets drunk, and plans to leave.

Hester is desperate to get him back despite the reappearance of her faithful, abandoned husband and the fact she clearly was unhappy in the liasion with the shallow More.

THE DEEP BLUE SEA introduced to moviegoers the "final" Vivien Leigh persona, the weary middle-aged woman still looking for passionate love, also on display in the later THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE and A SHIP OF FOOLS. Although A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE's Blanche DuBois was also in this mold, Vivien in 1951 still had her lovely voice and girlish figure, with a limp blonde hairstyle and superb acting she was able to suggest a fading woman. Four years later, Vivien actually had been aged by Mother Nature, though still quite beautiful and barely forty. Her voice had now deepened to a wary huskiness, her gait and personality showed a woman who had been frequently been hit by life. The film's director gives her very few closeups, just why is up for debate by I feel her eyes projected a hurt and sadness that was deeper than even this suicidal character was supposed to feel. Her performance is excellent but this excessively talky, fairly cold story (despite the passions displayed) won't please many viewers.

Kenneth More was hyped as "the next Olivier" at the time so it's ironic he's Vivien's leading man here; 20th Century-Fox for a short period tried unsuccessfully to make him an international film star with roles opposite Vivien, Lauren Bacall, and Jayne Mansfield but America at least could have cared less. He's a good actor, of course, but he lacks the dashing quality that would have made a society woman give it all up though he's more effective revealing the immature and rather boorish man underneath the polished uniform. Moira Lester throws in a touch of spice as the nosey neighbor across the hall though her character does not develop into the troublemaking snoop we are expecting.

I believe this was the first Rattigan motion picture financed by the American studios and give its failure at the box office it's a bit of a surprise they were more to come, all of them at least modest successes, THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL, THE YELLOW ROLLS ROYCE, and the Oscar-winning SEPERATE TABLES.

In this very British feature, Vivien Leigh plays a titled Lady, the estranged wife of a benighted judge, come down in the world to live with her feckless lover, fly-by-night (no pun intended) test pilot Kenneth More, given to drinking and golfing in equal measures. The arresting opening scene shows her nosy neighbours, no doubt aware of the novelty of her status and circumstances, finding her unconscious in her and her lover's cheap flat, having attempted suicide with a combination of sleeping pills and gas.

The assistance of a neighbouring ex-doctor, played by Eric Portman, who walks around in shades and who we later learn was struck off a year ago for an undisclosed misdemeanour, brings her round. Soon on the scene too is her posh ex, (Emlyn Williams) obviously still in love with her and who obviously still cares for her and who tries to win her back. From there, in a series of flashbacks, we're brought up to date as we see how the triangular situation commenced, developed and led up to her course of action. How the three of them go on on from there informs the rest of the movie up to the emotional climax at the end.

This is very much the type of drama with characters using words like "Whizzo" "cad" and "good form" that the Angry Young Men of the British theatre world were rebelling against at around this time and not much further around the corner the new wave of realism in British cinema and the "Kitchen Sink Dramas" of the early 60's. Here then we have yet another examination of upper class mores and a familiar storyline of marital infidelity, with as usual as much left out as in, no doubt respecting the morals of the day, for example that the main catalyst for the affair between Leigh and More is physical attraction just as much as her rejection of the staid high society life she's endured more than enjoyed up until then.

With a screenplay adapted from his own play by Terence Rattigan, it does look at times like a museum piece with its cut-glass accents, genteel manners and stereotypical depiction of the working class landlady and out of work actress tenant. It's also difficult to warm to Leigh's poor little rich girl plight and even less so More's waster of a character. Some attempts are made to shed the piece's theatrical roots most obviously with an episode at a skiing resort which adds little to the plot, but by the end you can almost see the actors following their cues up until Miss Leigh's time of reckoning at the end.

Maybe I just like my porridge a bit thicker and saltier than this but even as it was possible to admire to some extent the stagecraft of the piece and the solidity of the direction and acting, ultimately the piece left me rather unsympathetic to the main characters and cold to the film as a whole.

Anyone expecting an aristocratic performance by Vivien Leigh is doomed to disappointment. Clad in a drab series of blouses and slacks, she makes Hester Collier a self-interested neurotic perpetually needing succour from anyone willing to listen. Her main problem is a lack of self-reliance, as the Doctor (Eric Portman) informs her. The men in her life are self-interested in their different ways, and have no emotional capacity to empathise with her. The only person who understands anything is her landlady (Dandy Nichols).

Director Anatole Litvak opens the play to include multiple views of the seedier parts of London, where Hester (Leigh) has voluntarily ended up. The sera is hard and tough - not the place for a shrinking violet trying to assert her authority yet failing.

I can't help but feel that this film is one purely for devotees of Vivien Leigh, rather than one with much more general appeal. Her depiction of the rather selfish "Hester", stuck in an unhappy marriage with High Court Judge "Sir William" (Emyln Williams) whilst having a pretty open affair with former fighter pilot "Freddie" (Kenneth More) is really rather frosty, almost sterile. We start as she is found asleep in a chair, knocked out by a combination of sleeping pills and the gas from the fire. Eric Portman, a fellow lodger, helps revive her and we gradually begin to unravel her complicated situation driven by an almost self-destructive approach to her own life and to her relationships with both of her men. Sadly, though Williams performs adequately as her still loving and supportive husband, Moore and Leigh have no chemistry at all. He seems content to offer us little more than a hybrid preview performance of his Douglas Bader character from ("Reach for the Sky" made the next year) coupled with some drink-induced over acting, and she makes little impact on the complex nature of the characters offered us by Terence Rattigan. The production, like the whole thing, is competent and well put together, it's all just a bit flat and I was quite disappointed with the lack of warmth and passion in this tale of, essentially, warmth and passion...

Vivien Leigh, one of the most beautiful women ever to appear on the screen, is the only reason to watch this movie. The plot is old and tired, but Miss Leigh is always a delight to watch.

To all extents and purposes this film adaptation of Rattigan's arguably most famous play is lost. It was also written by Rattigan himself which gives it extra value as it broadens out the drama and uses flashbacks which could not be used on the stage, showing the growing relationship between the two lovers played by Vivien Leigh ( an extraordinary performance ) and Kenneth More as her weak willed lover. Emlyn Williams plays her unimaginative husband and he too stands out as being just right for the role. In fact the whole cast is excellent and Moira Lister is almost a match for Vivien Leigh in her gossipy role of a neighbour who tries to help when Hester ( Vivien Leigh ) tries to kill herself. The performance that is equal to Vivien Leigh is that of a struck off doctor played superbly by the great actor Eric Portman, and in the penultimate scene of the film he gives a light of hope in the darkness of the play which is both wise and moving. That this underrated film may have been too downbeat for audiences and perhaps critics alike is sadly possible in 1955, but for an audience of today the complexities of physical passion and love could be fully understood. So why has it not been put on to DVD ? There must be a good copy out there as it was shown at the National Film Theatre in recent years. So again who is sitting on it and why are no distributors interested ? I possess a poor copy of it in drained out colour, jump cuts and yet despite this the film glows and resonates. No Vivien Leigh film should be forsaken like this; especially a film of her last years when her acting was at its finest. Personally I find this loss shameful and should be rectified as soon as possible. Since writing the above review I have just seen it on UK Talking Pictures, and many thanks for showing it. The film looks almost perfect in Cinemascope and much cleaned up. Leigh is devastating, and Kenneth More's performance excellent. A heart breaking play and a heart breaking film.