Word: dona
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Louisiana Purchase (Victor Moore, Bob Hope, Vera Zorina, Dona Drake; (TIME...
Glamor is added to Frenchman's Creek by rigging everyone in costume (vaguely Restoration) and setting him high in the social scale. But the story of Lady Dona St. Columb is the same story that hundreds of women's-magazine serials have told & told again: the temptation and fall-strictly temporary-of a respectable woman. Says Lady Dona, over-assessing herself in the time-honored fashion of housewives...
...played too long a part un worthy of her. She had consented to be the Dona her world had demanded-a superficial, lovely creature, who walked, and talked, and laughed, accepting praise and admiration with a shrug of the shoulder as natural homage to her beauty, careless, insolent, deliberately indifferent, and all the while another Dona, a strange, phantom Dona, peered at her from a dark mirror and was ashamed...
This other Dona (whom thousands of Miss du Maurier's readers know as "the real me,") knew that "life need not be bitter, nor worthless, nor bounded by a narrow casement, but could be limitless, infinite-that it meant suffering, and love, and danger, and sweetness, and more than this even, much more." How much more, Miss du Maurier wisely neglects to say; but she does bring on, as Dona's lover, the one sort of man who could conceivably supply it: a Frenchman (They Understand Love). He is a philosophical pirate, as tired of the world...
...Dona meets him while she is rusticating, away from it all, on her husband's Cornish estate. She is assisted in her intrigue by one of those button-mouthed little men-servants whose lines, always the wittiest in the play, terminate in a dry "my lady." With the pirate, Dona forgets her inept domesticity in a mischievous piratical foray against her dunderhead neighbors, and in the 17th-Century equivalent of a long weekend at Atlantic City...