The magic of black and white films

He is a rich English lord with a very large house and his wife is a beautiful American with a mid-Atlantic accent. The lord is portrayed by Herbert Marshall, a screen idol of the 1930s and 1940s, his wife by Norma Shearer, a Hollywood superstar whose eyes alone enslaved men and whose figure caused me sleepless nights as a schoolboy, if you know what I mean. Then there is a suitor, Robert Montgomery, the patrician American heartthrob, who plays a rich drunken playboy who pursues Norma. But he does it with class and elegance, without a trace of toxic masculinity, a modern feminist broadside that didn’t exist among the upper classes back then.

Okay, it’s a movie. But it’s one that kept me up until 3.30 a.m. although I was dead sober and dying with desire for Norma and that twilit nostalgic period. The film is set in London and on the French Riviera, and was shot in a Hollywood studio in 1934. The plot is wonderful because it’s so predictable and believable, and the acting is superb and light. The lord goes on a trip, the wife runs into an old American friend in Cannes who pursues her drunkenly and madly. She succumbs to only one kiss, then locks herself into her suite. He attempts to go from his terrace on to hers, falls and ends up in hospital.

The paparazzi and gossip columns go wild – back then they pursued the upper classes, not the crumbums they do today – and the hubby demands the truth. She admits to one kiss, and nothing else. The doubts creep in and he turns cold and distant. She finds relief in her suitor, now out of hospital and very eager. The name of the flick is Riptide; it is written and directed by an Englishman.