The Impatient Years (1944)

The Impatient Years (1944) is an example of the kind of movie that is hardly ever made anymore, but was a staple of Hollywood’s heyday: current events.  In this case, the consequences of a hasty wartime romance, a quickie marriage and a baby – but when the couple are reunited when the soldier returns Stateside, they discover they are strangers.

(By the way, have a look at the "A" sticker on the car windshield in the picture above - and have a look at this previous post on gas rationing as depicted in the movies of World War II here.)

It’s a comedy, but it’s also a poignant and even rather sad take on what was a common problem as the divorce rate soared in the post-war years.  Even for those couples choosing to stay together, it was often a tough adjustment.  In a real sense, there was no getting back to “normal.”  There was only a mature and resigned acceptance that adapting to a new life was the only course.  Both husband and wife would have become different people in the meantime, due to their wartime experiences.

Jean Arthur is the lady, and she brings her trademark comic chops and intelligent silliness to the role of a young woman, repeatedly described by her father as a “nice girl,” so that we wouldn’t mistake her marrying a soldier almost the moment she met him as indicative of a “V-girl.”  “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t brought up right…it was wartime and they fell in love.” 

Now, however, waiting with her father at the bus station to welcome home her soldier husband on medical leave, she’s as nervous as a cat and clearly uncomfortable with the idea of being married to somebody she knew only for four days.

Lee Bowman plays her husband, home on temporary medical leave.  He’s just as uncomfortable with Jean as she is with him, more so because he is coming home not only to a wife he barely remembers, but to a father-in-law he’s never met, and must try to make himself at home in a house he’s never been to and is already crowded.

Charles Coburn is Jean’s father, reprising a similar role of curmudgeonly matchmaking as he did in The More the Merrier (1943) of the previous year.  In fact, you’ll notice his “The Torpedo Song” of that movie being reprised as a theme for his character in The Impatient Years every time Coburn enters a scene.  He is the voice of common sense, trying to get his daughter and son-in-law to give each other a chance before they divorce – the movie starts in divorce court and the plot is then revealed in flashback.

There are two more people in the house who are strangers to Lee Bowman, one is his infant son, in whom he is delighted, but nervous as to how to hold him.   He has seen only pictures, and is disappointed to have missed his first words – which include “Mama,” and “Henry.”

Henry, played by Phil Brown, is the other stranger, a boarder in the house.  He is a young man who has been immensely helpful with the baby and who regards Jean and the baby as his surrogate family.  A proper fellow who enjoys the routine around the baby that Jean Arthur has established for the home, Henry, as Charles Coburn remarks to Lee Bowman, “He’s a very fine young man.  You’re going to get very sick of him.”

And we see why, but I feel rather sorry for poor Henry, usurped by the baby’s real father.  Despite his late-hour, petulant confession to Jean Arthur that he is in love with her, he stands no chance.  Yet there he is, in Jean’s room, soothing the baby while she goes to warm up the bottle of milk, with Lee Bowman staggering around, trying to find a place to hang up his uniform.  

When Jean returns and the baby is settled, Bowman asks casually, “You finally got him in bed?” and we know that her uneasy reply of “yes,” just short of a double-take is because at that moment, they are both thinking of Henry.  It is one of a few clever double meanings in this script.

As I remarked in the post on her work in The More the Merrier: “Miss Arthur makes this brittle woman interesting, and lovably obtuse.”  One could say the same for her character here in The Impatient Years, except that here she is slightly more irritable as a means of defense.  Her skittishness, and his own being baffled by the strange surroundings and stranger family, Lee Bowman nonchalantly decides to sleep on the floor, giving the excuse that he is not used to a bed after rugged Army life.  It is a gallant move to put his wife at ease, though we can see that she might also take it as an insult.  He ruefully remarks of the baby in the crib next to her bed, “I think he’d be ashamed of his old man.”  It is both self-deprecating and a shaft of conscience to Jean Arthur.

But they quickly get on each other’s nerves the next day and decide to call their marriage quits.  We are brought back to the courtroom scene where Charles Coburn, in an attempt to force them to get to know each other as a way to avoid divorce, suggests to the judge, played by Edgar Buchanan, that they be required to re-live the four days of their courtship that led to their marriage.  Judge Buchanan remarks, “You boys and girls think it’s very romantic to get married just because it is wartime.  You don’t stop to think for a minute that there’s going to be an after the war time, with a whole long life to be lived together.”  Yes, if they're lucky.

It is an admonishment to the young lovers in the audience, and it is a daffy screwball comedy turn in the great tradition of that era, and so we have our second half of the movie as the now bickering couple find themselves in the scenes of their hasty courtship in San Francisco, revisiting the same restaurants, tourist sights, hotel, and marriage license office, leaving confused desk clerks in their wake.  As Miss Arthur grumbles about a marriage license clerk who does not understand that they need to fill out a marriage license to get a divorce, “For heaven’s sake, if he’s going to be so stupid, let’s go.”

Ironically, it is their very spatting like an old married couple that brings them closer together, along with reliving the scenes of their romance and being away from Pop, the baby, the crowded house, her regimentation with household chores, and Henry. 

Because they need to follow through on the judge’s orders, they kiss, but only to avoid committing perjury.  But aha, there’s a glimmer of falling in love again.

Grant Mitchell plays a befuddled hotel desk clerk very concerned about Jean Arthur’s welfare when he thinks Lee Bowman is not only a wolf, but mentally unstable; and Charley Grapewin is the world’s oldest bellboy.  

He loyally sits outside Jean’s door all night to protect her, and humors Lee Bowman when Lee says “I love you,” meaning this is the message he was trying to tap in their old code on the wall of Jean’s adjoining room.  Charley thinks Lee loves him.

When sailor Frank “The Old Magoo” Jenks cuts in at a hotel dance, we see Lee Bowman getting jealous, to Jean’s delight.  But she saves Bowman from the MPs by vouching he is her husband and takes him firmly by the arm, “C’mon, darling.”

Finally, they trek to the house of the minister who married them.  He is Harry Davenport, and his sweet wife is Jane Darwell.  She remembers the couple, and the old folks are thrilled that a couple married in their livingroom, for once, came back to visit them.  It is not a screwball moment, but a very sober example of what a long and dedicated marriage is, and Mr. Bowman and Miss Arthur feel somewhat shamefaced at their fecklessness.

Afterward, they end up at the place where they had their wedding dinner—a Chinese restaurant where the vocalist is Bob Haymes, actor and singer Dick Haymes’ younger brother.  I’m not sure the point of this interlude of him singing at their table, except to give the up-and-coming fellow a bit of screen time. He has a nice voice.  But the dinner is where they really relive their wedding night—Jean becomes ill on fried shrimp, just as she did the first time.

The hotel clerk and his erstwhile bellboy are on the alert when Bowman must carry her up the stairs and she blithely announces her husband has poisoned her.  Charles Coburn and poor Henry arrive at the 11^th hour with a telegram ordering Bowman to the military hospital for his end-of-furlough checkup. 

It now appears that since their trial courtship is over and Bowman is ordered back to active duty, there’s nothing to keep them together anymore. 

In a sweet ending, however, Jean returns to her father’s house to reunite with her baby and discovers Bowman there, playing with him on the floor.  Miracle of miracles—the little boy takes his first steps to Daddy, and Jean is overcome with emotion.  She wants the toddler to walk to her next, and Bowman asks, “Can I come too?”

We have our happy ending, except for Henry, of course.  He's out of luck.

The movie, while not packing a punch like The More the Merrier, has some good moments, and it is particularly noteworthy that the screenwriter and associate producer for the film was Virginia Van Upp (1902-1970) – a child actress in silent films, later a script writer, producer, film editor, casting director, agent – pretty much a Hollywood jack-of-all-trades, unusual for a woman at that time.  (And is this a swell photo or what?) She had been brought over from Paramount to Columbia for Cover Girl rewrites that same year by studio boss Harry Cohn.  Lee Bowman also appeared in that film.

Speaking of the studio boss, The Impatient Years was Jean Arthur’s last film for Columbia under her much-hated contract with much-hated Harry Cohn.  She was free at last, and the wonderful A Foreign Affair (1948) here, and Shane (1953), discussed here, were ahead of her.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

Buy this or any of my books online here at Bookshop.org.

Halloween in "Meet Me in St. Louis"

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) celebrates Halloween in a manner that probably had not been done before in movies, or even since.  Here, it is a time for children’s mischief and pranks, but the treats are a holiday spread for the entire family, a cozy home-party with no costumes or gory decorations. 

The movie takes us through an entire year of a family living in St. Louis, Missouri, from the summer of 1903 through the spring of 1904, and the four seasons each make up an “act” in the story.  The summer begins with anticipation for the building of the fairgrounds for next year’s St. Louis World’s Fair – or as little Margaret O’Brien grandly announces, “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition.”

The Technicolor musical is a lovely feast for both the eyes and ears, and parties and special events are opportunities to move the plot along in song.  Christmas, famously, is the winter portion of the movie and the climax of the story, where Judy Garland, the second-oldest daughter and middle child of five kids, croons the touching and sweetly sad, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to console Margaret O’Brien over the dismal prospect of the family moving away from St. Louis.

Spring is the shortest act, where the loose ends of the tale are tied up and we have our happy ending strolling through the magnificent grounds of the World’s Fair.  Before all that, however, we have an autumn interlude, which is a big chunk of the movie.

Judy has barely made an inroad to her romance with Tom Drake, “The Boy Next Door,” and the older brother, played by Henry H. Daniels, Jr., isn’t even in this segment because he’s away at college. Most of the segment focuses on the two little girls, Margaret O’Brien and Joan Carroll, who dress in costumes that came out of a rag bag and join neighbor kids on the street, who are piling scraps of wood and furniture on a bonfire in the road.  They break up into commando units to play pranks on neighbors. 

Mother Mary Astor, as her girls are getting ready to join the fun, reminds them that a neighbor lady has folded up a hammock and set it aside for the kids to “steal,” but would they please return it when they’re done.  This tells us that Halloween is intended to be more mock hooliganism than the actual thing—at least until young Margaret and Joan make a thrilling escape from a policeman after an attempt to derail a trolley.

Even before that surprising finale to the evening, we might raise our eyebrows at the idea that Margaret must prove her courage to the other kids by marching up to a feared, forbidding neighbor about whom they tell gross rumors of being a wifebeater and killer of cats, and throw a handful of flour into his face, screaming that she hates him (Grandpa Henry Davenport has advised her to wet the flour first, that way it will stick better). This is to break a banshee spell.  She does the job, albeit trembling all the way, and he, nonplussed, wipes the flour off his face as if he knows it’s just a Halloween thing not to take seriously, like the lady who allows her hammock to be stolen as long as she gets it back.  Margaret becomes a hero to the other kids, and her assault on a neighbor is apparently a rite of passage.

More concerning to today’s parents might be the sight of small children burning half the crates and small tables in the neighborhood in a huge bonfire in the road, unsupervised, if not unsanctioned. 

I can remember in the dim recesses of my childhood watching my father burn autumn leaves in the road by the curb, and also in a large rusty metal barrel, taller than me, meant for that purpose.  But it’s nothing I or my friends would have been allowed to do ourselves.

Halloween, despite the modern decorations meant to induce horror, has become a much tamer thing for children.

And apparently, far less civilized and mature for the adults (compared to today).  We see the family in the movie sitting down to a table with cake and apples, and the bounty of the season, for it seems more a celebration of harvest and autumn as a completion of another phase in the year.  As family maid and cook, Marjorie Main, blithely announces as she sits down with the family to enjoy her own piece of cake, “Well, here it is Halloween, and we’re all another year older.”

Just as we settle into a cozy Victorian parlor scene, chaos erupts.  Margaret O’Brien returns with a bloody lip and a tale of being attacked by Tom Drake.  Judy runs next door to belt Tom.  We assume this will not help their romance. A doctor is summoned (for Margaret, not Tom), and Margaret receives a few stitches, is tucked into bed with treats and made a fuss over—enjoying her invalidism immensely. Joan Carroll returns and excitedly tells Margaret what she missed when she left the fun—that the dummy “body” the kids placed on the trolley nearly derailed it, and they had to run from the constable.  Tom Drake had saved the girls from the police by hiding them down an alley, but they scoff at his interference.  As Margaret notes with a superior air, “As if anybody ever pays attention to girls!”

But a worse calamity suddenly befalls when Papa Leon Ames returns home, triumphant with the news that he is being promoted at his law firm and the family will be moving to New York.

Goes over like a lead balloon, and the family gives him the cold shoulder, from Grandpa down to little Margaret, and one by one, upset, they leave the parlor. 

Mom Mary Astor repairs the damage by soothing Pop, sitting down at the piano and playing the Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed tune “You and I.”  I don’t know if she’s really playing on the track, but you can see for yourself her “playing” is confident and realistic—as Mary Astor was a trained pianist herself.  Pop drifts towards the piano, putting down his cake, and wistfully begins to sing, but the sweet duet is dubbed, however.

One by one, the family all return to the parlor, resume the cake-eating, drawn by the sound and the comforting scene of their parents’ fine example of “life goes on.”  The family unit is all that matters.

The Halloween scene had moments of treats and tricks, and serves to put proper perspective on life’s challenges.  It’s easy to fight off pretend goblins and make-believe doom; it’s a lot scarier to face moving away from your comfortable house, your friends, and everything familiar to be forced into the great unknown.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

 

Claudia and David - 1946

Claudia and David (1946) takes us four years later into the marriage of Dorothy McGuire and Robert Young, first paired in Claudia (1943) discussed here on Monday. It’s an unusually successful sequel, partly because of the consistent excellence of McGuire and Young in the roles, and partly because the story, with a host of new characters, stands on its own.

Just as with my post on Claudia, I’m going to throw out spoilers here and there like the Easter bunny scattering eggs. Proceed with caution.

Elsa Janssen and Frank Twedell are back as their live-in servants, but Walter Lang is the new director at the helm. His style is less pensive and intimate than Edmund Goulding’s was on Claudia, but the film does not suffer for it. It has a broader scope, takes us outside into the community, long drives on rural Connecticut highways, and the homes of their friends. No longer is the ramshackle farmhouse an island unto itself.

And it has electricity now.

The baby McGuire was expecting at the end of Claudia is now a three-year-old boy, played by the adorable Anthony Sydes. Just as she clung too much to her mother in Claudia, here McGuire clings too much and too possessively to her son.

That, and their friendships with the opposite sex are the new challenges to their marriage.

We learn more about Young’s work as an architect. He plans to travel to a professional convention. McGuire doesn’t want him to go alone, and doesn’t want to go with him, either, and leave their son. She frets over every act of her husband’s independence. She mourns her lack of sophistication as they dress for a dinner party.

Young’s high society sister, played by the glamorous Gail Patrick, has invited a group of neighbors to her home, none of whom know each other very well.  Miss Patrick, always a pleasure to find in the cast of any movie, was nearing the end of her film career with only a few more after Claudia and David.  Unfortunately , she doesn't have much to do except lend the cachet of her own splendid elegance.

John Sutton is Miss McGuire’s dinner companion, who sneaks his oysters to her as they make fast friends. Rose Hobart, who we last saw here in Conflict (1946) as the severe wife of Humphrey Bogart is here the severe wife of John Sutton. Their marriage is a bit rocky as they are growing apart after the loss of their son. Miss Hobart obsesses over her child’s death, and tries to find consolation attempting to contact him through psychics.

Jerome Cowan, who I love to pick out in so many supporting roles, plays a phony psychic at the dinner party.

The wonderfully pompous Florence Bates, another favorite in the stable of character actors, is his champion who swears by him. He warns McGuire of a dire accident to come.

Mary Astor plays a newcomer to the neighborhood, a widow with a young daughter, who wants Robert Young to design a new house and barn on her property. They hit it on very well from the start, which will cause Miss McGuire a great deal of jealousy.

The movie, in a gentle and smooth way, debunks the traditional Hollywood idea of a “happily-ever-after” in marriage. Here, all the married couples must work at their marriages if they want to keep them.

The dinner party scene is especially intriguing, because we have all the principle characters together, and the camera can pause on different groupings and individuals as we drift in and out of conversations. The characters we don’t know well are all neatly established for us in a few minutes.

Mary Astor had already started playing mothers of grown, more glamorous, children, and the dowager parts were coming soon.  Just as with Gail Patrick, Claudia and David lets us see Miss Astor one more time as elegant and provactive. In her excellent memoir on her film career, Mary Astor - A Life on Film (NY: Delacorte Press, 1971, pp. 190-191), Mary Astor recounts her work in this film, with special emphasis on the consequences of the dinner party scene.

I enjoyed (Claudia and David)—I loved it—I wasn’t anybody’s mother and I looked lovely in beautiful clothes…

There was a big formal dinner…quite a long episode with a lot of dialogue. I think it was two or three days’ work. Table scenes are difficult, technically. People can’t be moved around, there are cross cuts, you are attached to the table. It’s a lighting and camera problem mainly, and takes time.

The first course—and only course…was oysters. Lovely fresh bluepoints on the half shell served on an iced plate with the usual accompaniments…The first day we were all delighted with the excellence of the oysters that the studio had provided us…The first two shot you spear an oyster, dip it into the sauce and swallow it quickly in time for whatever it is you have to say. While the other person is speaking, you have time to eat another, or to wipe your lips with a napkin. But, careful! It has to match: You ate an oyster at that point in the establishing shot!

No lunch that day. Just, “I think I’ll like down during lunch hour.”

After three days of eating nothing but oysters and crackers, the body rebels…Dorothy and I had the longest scenes, the most close-ups—and in spite of frequent visits to the ladies’ room, we both looked rather pale and wan in the sequence that followed…

Just as in the first movie, Claudia’s challenge is become more emotionally mature. She deals, awkwardly if earnestly, with her jealousy over Mr. Young’s attentions to Mary Astor, and in turn, she must comfort Rose Hobart, who is jealous over McGuire’s relationship with John Sutton. Sutton, in a friendly though perhaps unwise gesture, sends Dorothy McGuire a dozen white roses.

Miss Hobart, in a moving scene, recalls that her husband gave her white roses only three times in her life: when they were married, when their son was born…and as consolation just after he died.

Seeing Hobart’s faults in herself, McGuire is determined not to be jealous and  tells Young, “Don’t let’s ever fight again.”

He replies, with his usual sense, “Well, that’s a tall order, but I’d rather have you fight back than be one of those noble women.” Regarding his friendship with Miss Astor, “Do you think marriage means the beginning and end of all human contact?”

McGuire’s mother, who died in Claudia is mentioned here on a few different occasions in a nice bit of continuity, and serves as a reminder to McGuire to not cling too tightly to those she loves.

Just as in the first movie, this one has two very grave episodes that add surprising depth. The first is when their little boy comes down with measles. John Sutton brings Dorothy McGuire home from the house party and they find the child unconscious with a fever-induced seizure. Sutton, with the help of the servants, takes over and helps undress the boy and put him in a tub of water.

The doctor is another favorite character actor, Harry Davenport.

When Robert Young returns home late to the commotion, he graciously thanks Sutton for taking his place, then angrily confronts his wife for not calling him and becomes jealous himself.

The second potential tragedy happens during preparations for their own dinner party. As McGuire gets ready to dress, they get word that Young has been involved in an auto accident.

Elsa Janssen holds the fort while her husband, Frank Twedell, drives McGuire to Doc Davenport’s office, where the unconscious Young has been moved. In a striking scene, really brutal despite its simplicity, we see the viewpoint out the car window as they come upon the highway accident scene.

A cop directs traffic. Rubberneckers begin to swarm. Two cars are wrecked. One is Robert Young’s. It’s completely upside down.

We pass it slowly. The camera is mesmerized by it, and so are we. McGuire and Twedell exchange no conversation; we can almost sense her heart in her mouth.

Later, after Robert Young has been transported to the hospital and they await a call, McGuire must endure the horror of a house full of guests. They are the same Hobart and Sutton, Gail Patrick and her husband, and Mary Astor, but now they are no longer strangers and wait out the long night together. They have all been through a trial by fire, in their own marriages and in their friendships with each other. Astor, aware she has inspired jealousy in McGuire, delicately helps her to dress.  When Dorothy McGuire leaves the party to visit Young in the hospital, Rose Hobart, no longer jealous, magnanimously suggests to her husband that he drive her.

Claudia and David could have led to further adventures, but by this time Dorothy McGuire was eager to move beyond the scatterbrained wife roles. Finding challenging material to equal her prodigious talent would be a problem for the remainder of her career, more than just the common complaint of actors of being typecast. Hedda Hopper, syndicated in the Toledo Blade, August 7, 1946 wryly noted, “Dorothy McGuire got caught in her own web of excellence.”

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.

"That Forsyte Woman" - 1949

In That Forsyte Woman (1949), Errol Flynn gives a riveting performance as a jerk. He is a man of substantial self-importance, without humor or any self-effacing quality which might be termed human. And yet, he turns this characterization on its axis, and we find ourselves fascinated, and ultimately sympathetic with his very human flaws.

He plays Soames Forsyte in this dramatization of the John Galsworthy classic stories. Greer Garson is a lady of no particular age, whose loveliness in this role is tempered by her wretchedness, and a sordid realization that she has compromised on many levels the integrity we are meant to believe in her, hurting herself and others.

She is a piano teacher, poor and alone in the world, with only her beauty and her finer qualities of character to recommend her, who marries the snobbish Errol Flynn mainly because she is exhausted from refusing him, which she had done a number of times.

But we are told time and again in this movie that what Errol wants, Errol gets, through shear willpower and determination.

It probably does not need to be said, but one is compelled to note again how mind-blowingly handsome this man was.

Right, then. Continuing…

Though he beams with the triumph of ownership when she becomes his bride, Errol soon realizes with bitterness that a woman is not a piece of furniture or an object of art, or any pretty bauble that one buys and owns, because he cannot own all of her. He does not have her heart.

Walter Pidgeon is on board as Errol’s cousin and Greer’s sympathetic friend, and eventual soulmate. This is only right and proper; he is, after all, Walter Pidgeon.

Robert Young is a cheeky young architect engaged to Janet Leigh, who is Walter’s daughter. However (insert ominous chords of music here), Robert and Greer are scandalously attracted to each other, and fall in love. All told, there are three suitors in this film after Greer Garson. Not a bad gig.

Set in London in the 1880s, the film is rich with Victorian set dressing, lush costuming, gaslight, and impenetrable fog. We find ourselves in elegant drawing rooms, art galleries, and cold, stark artists’ studios.

The Forsytes are only a couple generations removed from working class people, but now they are the newly wealthy, and as stuck-up as possible, regarding every privilege as a birthright and every non-family member as an underling.

Harry Davenport plays Walter Pidgeon’s father, the patriarch of this stuffy clan. Walter, however, is banished from their company because he is the black sheep. For one, he is an artist, not a man of business. For another, he eloped with his baby daughter’s nursery governess after the death of his wife and ran off to Paris to paint. He left his daughter, Janet Leigh, in the care of his powerful family, who forbid him to see her.

There is so much to look at in this film, but one is always distracted by the elegant Errol Flynn, who wears his impatient pomposity like a monarch’s robe; something he has been born to, deserves, and never fails to parade. What finally induces Greer to marry him is possibly his enormous self-confidence. For many women, this is as much a lure of security as a healthy bank book.

This quality may be what Mr. Flynn understands most about the character and why he plays it so well. He was himself a man of prodigious self-confidence, a person for whom perhaps everything came easy. Boredom and restlessness result from this trait as much as does success. It can be a double-edged sword. It probably was in Flynn’s case.

What strikes the viewer is the playfulness, even more than the understanding, that he brings to this character. He seems to enjoy wearing a pince-nez. In one scene, he enters the dim hall of Greer’s boarding house, and his top hat smacks against the chandelier. He gives it a glance of longsuffering loathing, refusing to surrender his dignity. It is moment of comedy, and a glimpse into Flynn’s ability to be self-effacing even if Soames Forsyte is not.

His characterization is not parody, however. Mr. Flynn has another good scene over the dinner table with Greer on their wedding anniversary. He is chafing under her polite formality with him, knowing that despite her acquiescence to his every whim, including letting him choose her dresses for her, she cannot love him with the passion he seems to feel he has bought and paid for. We are meant to take it as a slight to his vanity throughout the film, for he never indicates his passion for her. It is only at the end of the movie we see his wounded heart and feel sorry for him.

Until then, he only displays irritability as a mask for his hurt feelings. At one point during the course of his brittle dinner conversation, a scene that shows marvelous restraint, he accuses her of forgetting their anniversary. When at last he discovers under a napkin the gift she has left on his plate, he is contrite and vulnerable. Flynn does excellent work in this tense scene.

Obviously, for purposes of the film, the Galsworthy stories are condensed and somewhat altered, but the movie is a good introduction to the troubled and tragic Forsyte family.

Greer becomes almost instantly attracted to Robert Young, who, open and fun-loving, a man who talks to children as an equal, is by nature the exact opposite of Mr. Flynn. He pursues her, and she refuses him because, more than the threat of scandal, she does not want to betray her beloved “niece,” Janet Leigh, who is like a companion to her. However, they are all tragedy bound.

Greer starts this film visiting a morgue, a haunted expression on her face, her eyes puffy. It is an unglamorous beginning. Though in some scenes she still produces gaiety with that trademark slip of laughter in her voice, she is for the most part an unhappy woman in this film. She is a victim of circumstances, of her own bad choices, and fate.

Walter Pidgeon is also tragic, but he appears as a more romantic figure for all his melancholy perhaps because, unlike Greer and Errol, he is true to his heart and honest about his feelings. He is a gentle, kindly man, humble about his artistic talent, who wants to reunite with his daughter. It is funny to think that in five years this dark-haired 40-ish dashing artist will become the gray-haired worn-out businessman in Executive Suite (1954) - see previous post here.

That is perhaps another fun thing about this movie, the great romantic intrigue, the jealously and passion are all played out by middle-aged characters. By contrast, the young Janet Leigh, groomed by MGM and kept busy in a number of films at this point in her career, seems callow and less interesting.

Here, Mr. Pidgeon is ultimately still Greer’s hero. Perhaps we would be disappointed if he were not. Clem and Kay Miniver are ghosts in every movie in which Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon appeared together after Mrs. Miniver. This was, I think, the sixth of eight total movies. No matter how compelling the magnificent Errol was, even he couldn’t break up the team.