Object of the week: Signed cast and crew photo from 1940s hit melodrama The Seventh Veil

Before production even began, the classic 1945 British melodrama The Seventh Veil had a lot to contend with. For a start, the film was the product of an independent company (unusual for the time), which meant that its financing, casting and route to eventual distribution were somewhat precarious. Filming had already been underway for a fortnight before the film’s male star James Mason even signed his contract. 

The project was a gamble for producer Sydney Box, trying to move decisively into the fictional feature film space, having been an important maker of documentary factual shorts during wartime. In fact, the origins of The Seventh Veil lay in research originally undertaken for a documentary on the treatment with hypnosis of traumatised war veterans, suffering from what we’d now call PTSD. 

Sydney Box and his co-writer (and wife) Muriel Box saw the potential for a peacetime story centred on a different kind of trauma that might be conquered through hypnotherapy: a psychologically scarred young concert pianist, Francesca (played by Ann Todd), is pushed to the brink of suicide by her inner demons and must decide what she wants her future to be. A psychoanalytic ‘talking cure’ facilitated by hypnosis, and managed by the sympathetic Dr Larsen (Herbert Lom), offers the route to liberation.

The film’s production was dogged by more practical problems too, related to timing (the final year of the war) and location (Riverside Studios, by the Thames in Hammersmith, west London). As Muriel Box recalled in her autobiography, V-2 rockets were “a constant menace” across London from late 1944, making it difficult to get to Riverside without “disappearing into bomb-craters in the road”. 

Once there, “gaping holes caused by falling shrapnel made a chequerboard of the roof, and during storms rain dripped persistently on to the set. This, together with the intermittent moan of the siren, played havoc with dialogue recording”, as did the bombs themselves, “exploding at unexpected moments near the studio”.

This signed photograph of gathered cast and crew on the last day of filming captures and commemorates, above all else perhaps, a collective sense of overwhelming relief that they had managed to overcome all the problems that made them “often despair of ever being able to finish shooting the picture”, as Muriel Box put it. 

We can see her, seated in a chair on the left of the photograph, looking down and smiling. On her right is cinematographer Reg Wyer, and directly behind him is Sydney Box in pin-striped suit. 

The Boxes’ young daughter Leonora is sitting on make-up artist Nell Taylor’s lap. Dead centre, left to right, are director Bob Compton Bennett, and stars Ann Todd and James Mason. All three would answer the siren call of Hollywood soon after, with Mason departing that same week. 

Muriel and Sydney Box would receive their own Hollywood acclaim too, in the shape of an Academy award for best original screenplay. From its chequered wartime provenance, The Seventh Veil had gone on to be an international critical and commercial success, and one of the biggest box-office hits of its era in Britain. The gamble, and the hard work, paid off.

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.