Blanche Fury

Blanche Fury (1948)

Young, lovely, passionately beautiful ... and her love was as wild and tempestuous as her name!

Penniless Blanche Fuller takes a job as a governess at the estate of her rich relations, the Fury family. To better her position in life, Blanche marries her dull cousin, Laurence Fury, who has a daughter she's fond of. But Blanche begins a tempestuous romance with steward Philip Thorn. Together, they hatch a murderous plan to gain control of the estate.

Date of release
1948-02-19
TMDB
6.2 / 10 (25)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Drama, Thriller, Romance
Director
Marc Allégret

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Blanche Fury
  • Filmed in: Pinewood Studios

Blanche Fury is a 1948 British Technicolor drama film directed by Marc Allégret and starring Valerie Hobson, Stewart Granger and Michael Gough. It was written by Audrey Erskine Lindop, Cecil McGivern and Hugh Mills adapted from the 1939 novel of the same title by Joseph Shearing. In Victorian era England, two schemers will stop at nothing to acquire the Fury estate, even murder. The plot is based on the Stanfield Hall slayings, an actual contemporary homicide case.

Production

Star Valerie Hobson was married to producer Anthony Havelock-Allan. She later recalled "I had just had our son, who was born mentally handicapped, and he meant the film as a sort of 'loving gift', making me back into a leading lady, which was a wonderful idea. The film didn't work completely."

The film was announced in September 1946. (Shortly afterwards 20th Century Fox announced they would make a film from another Shearing novel, Moss Rose.) Stewart Granger, then one of the biggest stars in British films, signed to co-star and Marc Allégret was to direct.

Filming started in January 1947 at Pinewood Studios. The stately home used in the exterior shots is Wootton Lodge in Staffordshire. The courtroom scenes were filmed in the Shire Hall at Stafford. The location scenes for the film were shot at Wootton Lodge (which stood in for Clare Hall in the story), a magnificent three-storey Georgian mansion at Upper Ellastone on the Derbyshire–Staffordshire border and on the surrounding Weaver Hills, as well a…

Granger later said the film "was a silly story, too grim and melodramatic, but it's a wonderful looking film... I enjoyed working with Valerie Hobson, but the film didn't work."

Havelock-Allan later said he felt the most exciting aspect of the story was the murder being committed by a "gypsy woman" who was actually a man. However, he says: "Stewart Granger refused to play it dressed as a woman, even though you would only have seen a flash of him, so it lost that high point scene."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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