The Bully as Romantic Hero
By Anne Bernays
It began with the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. According to this ancient story, P. , a sculptor, creates a statue so beautiful that he falls in love with it. The goddess Aphrodite, touched by his ardor, turns it into a she. Now named Galeta, she returns Pygmalion’s love and they go off to eternal Loveland together.
The playwright, George Bernard Shaw, author of several brilliant too-rarely produced plays, turned this narrative into the dazzling “Pygmalion.” Fortunately, Shaw was sharp enough not to have the mismatched couple (Professor Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle) pair up and his Galeta goes off with a perfectly nice fellow named Freddie. The Broadway show and the subsequent movie, fun as they were to watch, has the two (Henry and Eliza) reunite in the final scene.
Along comes “The Seventh Veil,” a 1945 tearjerker that I saw the year it came out. It’s about a lonely, rich, hurt-by-love bachelor, Nicholas, whose distant cousin, a teenage girl named Francesca, comes to live with him in his gloomy London mansion. When this grumpy Pygmalion discovers that his Galeta can play the piano uncommonly well, he decides that she must become a world-class performer . To that end, over a period of seven years, he assumes total control over his ward’s life, down to her clothes, the way she takes a bow, what she eats, etc., etc. In other words, she can’t make a move without his approval. Nevertheless, she meets a band leader while eating lunch alone in a restaurant and falls in love with him. Discovering this disloyalty, Nicholas whips Francesca off to Europe for seven years of study and performance.
Francesca is the ideal pupil/prisoner. Not yet old enough to leave him legally, she sometimes chafes at her situation, “Why can’t you be kind to me?” she asks him. Silly girl.
He answers, “You can do exactly as you please.” Neither of them believes it.
On we go through two more would-be love affairs until, tested to the limit, Nicholas tells Francesca, “You belong to me,” and he brings his cane violently down across her hands while she’s playing the piano. She goes berserk and ends up prone in a hospital, convinced she’ll never play again. The kindly shrink who tries to get to the bottom of this mishigas, asks her why she obeyed Nicholas without question. “Nicholas has extraordinary power over me.”
As the plot thickens Francesca must choose between her three boyfriends and Nicholas (if this sounds too implausible, let me reassure you that the screenwriter was adept and worked it out so that, at least while its happening, we go along with this lottery). And whom does she choose? Nicholas, the narcissistic bully, running into his open arms. Sitting in Loew’s 86th Street in 1945, I was as ecstatic as Francesca.
Consider how much our world has changed — from hero to villain in less than a century.
P.S. If the cane scene turned up in a contemporary movie, Nicholas would have been hauled off in handcuffs.
