The Constant Nymph (1943) dir. Edmund Goulding. Full movie

[jserraglio]

Brief Synopsis: Fourteen-year-old Tessa (Fontaine) falls hopelessly in love with a family friend, the handsome but failing modernist composer Lewis Dodd (Boyer) and revives his passion for music. When her father dies, Dodd contacts her late mother's wealthy family so they'll take care of Tessa and her sisters. meanwhile, Dodd becomes infatuated with Tessa's haughty cousin Florence (Smith) and the two soon marry, but Florence soon becomes consumed with jealousy over the bond between her husband and her cousin Tessa. —adapted from IMDB

Joan Fontaine, Charles Boyer. Alexis Smith, Charles Coburn and Peter Lorre. Fontaine who plays the teen-age Tessa is actually older in real life than Alexis Smith who plays her adult rival for the affections of Lewis Dodd--Fontaine was 25 in 1943.

Musical score by Erich Korngold, including a performance of “Tomorrow” which one year later was performed in concert as a symphonic tone poem, op. 33.

The full motion picture, commercially suppressed for many years by Margaret Kennedy, the novelist on whose book the film was based, can now be viewed in a superb transfer on archive.org.

TCM, which premiered its revival in 2011, has screened it again recently and it is streaming on the TCM app now thru March 11.

https://archive.org/details/the-constant-nymph-1943

I came to it mainly for Korngold's music but found the acting to be very good, if at times old-fashioned and melodramatic, and the story strangely moving, a sort of Lolita manqué..

Fontaine was deservedly nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award, her third short listing—she had already been nominated for Rebecca (1940) and then won the AA for her role in Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941).