The Astonished Heart

Intriguingly schematic account (based on Coward's own playlet) of a psychiatrist's sexual obsession with a good-time girl (Leighton), and the effect it has on his devoted, self-denying, sexless wife (Johnson) as it ultimately drives him to self-destruct by throwing himself off a high building. In its way it crystallises and criticises the conventional attitudes towards sex prevalent throughout British cinema in the immediate post-war period, and which Fisher was to turn upside-down in his vampire movies, where the neurotic female altruism represented here by Celia Johnson is transformed by the cathartic presence of Dracula into ravening sexuality.