Seventh Sin, The (DVD)

From W. Somerset Maugham's popular 1925 novel about an unloving marriage at a flash point and a selfish adulteress who travels a turbulent path to redemption, this second film version of The Painted Veil fixes Eleanor Parker (of the 1946 Maugham-based Of Human Bondage), Bill Travers and Jean-Pierre Aumont as the points of a fraught romantic triangle in 1949 Hong Kong. When her affair with a married man (Aumont) is discovered by her bacteriologist husband (Travers), an aimless American socialite (Parker) is issued an ultimatum: join her spouse in a remote Chinese village where he'll help combat a brutal cholera epidemic or face a humiliatingly public divorce that will ruin their lives. Can a stillborn love be awakened in a jumbled atmosphere of hatred and death? Could a searching heart uncover the willing spirit within? Lushly shot in Cinemascope and superbly scored by Miklos Rozsa, The Seventh Sin, directed by Ronald Neame and costarring George Sanders, Francoise Rosay and Ellen Corby, is a moving tale of human need and absolution.