The latter constantly plots against Lydia and is successful in temporarily breaking up the marriage, but can a miracle of restored vision be seen?

[7] Bennett claimed he "didn't even read" the script "until I was on my way back across the Atlantic to direct it, and then I wanted to throw up.

Filming took place at Denham Studios in Buckinghamshire and on location in the south of France in Aix-en-Provence at a castle belonging to the de Sabran family.

She later recalled enjoying the filming but said it was hard work: We did a lot of swimming around in a tank in the studio at Denham.

Desmond Dickson was the cameraman.... and he said to me one say, 'You're only allowed close ups in profile or if your face is distorted in anger – but we're getting around it!'

[18][19] Lockwood still managed to be voted the fifth most popular British star at the local box office for 1949.

In the Radio Times, David Parkinson called the film an "unpersuasive melodrama", and wrote, "this hackneyed hokum is worth sticking with for the risible showdown...kudos to the supporting cast for keeping straight faces throughout.

"[21] Matthew Coniam wrote in the BFI Screenonline, "despite low critical standing (Margaret Lockwood's biographer Hilton Tims calls it "a throwback to the worst excesses of Gainsborough's pulp-fiction days") this is among the star's more interesting post-Gainsborough work...However ripe the plot, writer-director Charles Bennett is subtler in his effects and devices than most critics allow...a remarkable degree of suspense is achieved in the scene in which Veritée attempts to drown Lydia, with its undercurrent of subdued eroticism...Bennett had co-written many of Hitchcock's finest movies, and this film is highly reminiscent of Rebecca (US, 1940) in its settings (an imposing house near a raging coastline), and plot motifs (a commoner's marriage to a wealthy landowner is deliberately strained by a hate-filled third party).