Blanche Fury - 1948 film review

Blanche Fury, a 1948 historical melodrama starring Stewart Granger and Valerie Hobson, was based on a book of the same name by Joseph Shearing published nine years earlier. The Shearing pseudonym was used by Marjorie Bowen, a highly prolific and undoubtedly accomplished writer, and the Shearing stories were typically based on real life historical cases. For instance, Airing in a Closed Carriage is based on the Maybrick case.

Blanche Fury was inspired by a real life case rather less well-known than the Maybrick case, although quite notorious in its day. This was the double murder at Stanfield Hall in Norwich in 1848, when a father and son were shot dead by a tenant farmer. The details of the case are significantly changed in the film, not least in the transposition of the setting to Staffordshire, but perhaps the most significant change is the focus on the title character, played by Hobson.

Blanche is a strong woman, well-born but poor, who yearns for position and affluence. She is doing drudge work as a companion when she's contacted by Simon Fury, who wants her to come to Clare Hall, and look after his grand-daughter, Lavinia. Lavinia's father is played by Michael Gough, and he takes a shine to Blanche. But so, unfortunately, does the much more charismatic Philip Thorn (Granger) who believes he is the rightful owner of Clare, and has been denied his inheritance by the unfairness of the laws on illegitimacy.

There's a doom-laden feeling to the story, which proceeds at a sombre pace. By modern standards, the presentation of a gang of villainous gypsies seems like a classic example of unpleasant stereotyping, but leaving that issue aside, the story is quite a good one. It is, as I say, more of a melodrama than a murder mystery, but it's quite watchable The script was co-written by Audrey Erskine Lindop, who would later write I Start Counting, a novel which also became a successful film..

Quiz Question

I’ve acquired a new bibliography of a writer whose life has long been shrouded in quite a bit of mystery, and who used at least three pseudonyms. The material in the book prompts me to set a quiz question.

The real identity of this author was the subject of much speculation when he or she published a pseudonymous novel in 1931. Can you guess the real person - who was variously identified by critics and others as being:

Aldous Huxley
Rose Macauley
E. M. Delafield
Edgar Wallace
Francis Brett Young
H.G. Wells
Richard Hughes
W. Somerset Maugham
Marie Belloc Lowndes
R. Austin Freeman
Eden Philpotts
Francis Brett Young
Roland Pertwee
Bernadette Croce
Warwick Deeping
Robert Hichens
Marjorie Bowen
Osbert Sitwell
Charles Williams
Patrick Hamilton
Anthony Rolls
Stella Benson
E.M. Forster

An extraordinarily diverse list, I think you’ll agree. Some eighteen months passed after publication before the truth about the author’s identity was revealed. Who can guess what it was? (Clue: none of the above!)

The answer will appear here shortly.