I’ll Never Forget You (1951) is one of those quiet movies that if
you catch it on a rainy day, the gentle memory of it will stay with you for a long, long
time.
It’s a time-travel romance, and
like all time-travel stories, from Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward: 2000-1887, which was published in 1887 and has
never been made into a movie, to
Portrait
of Jennie, to
Somewhere in Time,
the “present” depicted as the point from which the story is launched is as
integral to the adventure as the final destination.
The “present” is the locale—or state of
mind—from which the protagonist is trying to escape, and interestingly, because
the past is fixed for us, the “present” is the part of the story that
inevitably becomes dated.
Long post. Best to make some toast and let the dog out now. Also a few well-meaning spoilers, for which I beg your pardon.
The “present” for I’ll Never Forget You is post-World War
II, and the protagonist is a nuclear physicist.
The movie is a remake of Berkeley
Square (1933), the “present” for which was 1933. It was based on a play of the same name that
was produced in London in 1926, and on Broadway in 1928, so the “present” from
which to escape was one of Jazz Age frenzy, of motor cars and shallow society,
and the memory of the Great War.
The Broadway version of
John L. Balderston’s play was co-directed by Leslie Howard who also
starred. It was a hit, and Mr. Howard
reprised his role in the 1933 movie, for which he was nominated for an Academy
Award. I’ll Never Forget You is one of those times where the remake is
better than the original, partly because of technological advances in
filmmaking, and partly because I think the story benefitted, was really fleshed
out, when launched from a more somber and mature “present”. The 1933 version shows a fitful, restless dissatisfaction
with the “modern age,” but the 1951 version has nuclear annihilation as its
“present,” with the prospect of no future at all. Curiously, I’ll Never Forget You is a brighter, more hopeful movie despite
this.
Tyrone Power plays
Peter Standish, the atomic scientist burdened with guilt and despair over the
enormous ethical and moral consequences of his work. The story is set in London. He is an American helping with the British nuclear
program, and he lives in an 18th century townhouse in Berkeley
Square, a home he inherited from a distant cousin. The furnishings of the house are original,
and with the exception of modern plumbing and electricity, the rooms look
pretty much as they did in the late 1700s.
On the wall above the
fireplace is a large painting of his distant relative, painted in 1784, a man
also called Peter Standish. He looks
exactly like Tyrone Power.
One of the intriguing
aspects to the movie is that we never really slip off into a ghost story, though it feels like this could happen any moment. However, Tyrone Power finds reality far more haunting than any supernatural elements of the story. Tyrone orchestrates his trip to the
past as carefully as he would conduct an experiment in the lab—or nearly
so; he does make mistakes, and they cost him.
Along with the furnishings, he has discovered
this 18th century Peter Standish’s diary, which tells of his life in
this house. He was an American, too, a
veteran of the Revolutionary War. In
1784, the war over, he traveled to Britain to meet his
cousin, Kate Pettigrew to complete an arranged marriage with her. It was through his marriage to her that he
came to live in this, her family home.
The last few entries of
the diary are strange, as this Peter Standish fancies he has seen into the
future, experienced life in the 20th century.
Tyrone Power, so
absorbed by the past of this house, and armed with the
diary of Peter Standish, concludes that he and Standish will switch places, that
it is inevitable that they do so, for a limited time. Then, as noted in Standish’s diary, Standish
will return to his own time and marry Kate, have children, and live his life
here. Tyrone Power therefore believes that he,
too, will return to his own time, but not before he enjoys one heck of an
adventure.
He needs some time off,
anyway. He’s been working too hard.
We begin at the lab, with
concrete walls and eerie glowing dials, an experiment in some reaction of two
substances that cast off a white glare, gauges that measure in Röntgens, and
serious men doing unfathomable science.
It’s a slow start to the movie, but curiously intense. At one point, Tyrone pushes an experiment to
the danger zone, and his boss has to remind him not to take chances. He thinks Tyrone needs some downtime.
Handsome Michael Rennie
is his co-worker and the closest thing Tyrone has to a friend.
Mr. Power is a loner, and his socially awkward
manner with Rennie, who has also been trying to introduce him to his sister, is
a really good fit for the character.
(In
Berkeley Square, Leslie Howard just
seems like a boyish eccentric with too much nervous energy.
Tyrone Power’s brooding introspection is more appealing.)
But having said that, I love the comic moment when Leslie Howard delightedly discovers his pony tail.
“What about going away
for a while?” Rennie asks
companionably. Power replies, “I
am.” It’s a long shot with the room,
cavernous, foreshadowing his portal to the past. He confesses his theory about his upcoming
time travel to 1784. He explains, much
as other writers have sought to explain, that time is not a straight line, the
way we might draw a chronology of events.
It co-exists in another
dimension.
“I believe the 18
th
century still exists.
It’s all around us
if only we could find it.”
What
particularly appeals to him is the break from nuclear annihilation, although,
despite the scary lab at the beginning, this is never spoken, only implied, as
are the horrors of World War II, and the Holocaust.
The director knows the audience doesn't need reminding. Indeed, they've come to the movie theater to forget the front page. Similarly, Tyrone Power looks forward to returning to “The age of
reason, of dignity and grace, of quietness and peace.”
A thunderstorm is
brewing outside, and the lights go out.
Tyrone lights a candelabra and takes Mr. Rennie upstairs to see the
diary. Creepy music as they climb the
stairs—shades of a ghost story, but not quite.
Michael Rennie thinks
he’s nuts, but he’s a tactful guy and worried.
He implores Tyrone to leave the house, as it seems to have cast a spell on him. Tyrone sees him to the door, and stands outside a moment on the steps as
a thunderstorm moves in. Time travel in
this story is done by thunderstorm.
A clap of thunder, a
bolt of lightning, and Tyrone falls, collapsing on the landing.
The camera draws our
attention to the door of the house, as the metal mail slot begins to
disappear. Then an arm reaches up from
the landing—Tyrone’s arm, grasping for the knob to pull himself up.
A tuft of lace
protrudes from the sleeve of his coat, a striped pattern—and it's--in color! Upon opening the door of his own home, he
sees Kate, his intended, here played by Beatrice Campbell, lowering herself to
a deep curtsey in a hall of soft colors and the muted gentle sound of a harp
playing a light air (or ayre, we are in London). Tyrone’s in 1784. (Oooh! Pretty!)
This Wizard of Oz-style use of a dreary
black-and-white existence and escape into a Technicolor world is only one of
the technological improvements on the original Berkeley Square of 1933, though to be sure, it is the most spectacular.
Counting the original
stage play, these three incarnations of the story are interesting for what
their medium allows them to convey. The
original stage script is tight and very witty, with one character, Kate’s brother
Tom, who is a rogue, getting a crack at some risqué dialogue. One can sense the inventive use of
present/past on a fixed set. I don’t
know if this old chestnut is staged anymore, but I’d love to see it. I enjoyed reading the lively script very
much. (By the way, I understand there was a TV version in March 1949 with Richard Greene and Grace Kelly in the lead roles. Wish I could see this.)
Berkeley Square the movie is toned down both in language (less saucy) and action, and has a somewhat confusing
beginning showing Leslie Howard as the original Peter Standish enjoying the
fellowship of his new friends in a pub.
Then we must work to accept him as the 20th century
version. The movie attempts to follow
the play, with only a few scenes out of the house, but what might be called
stagey I think is really just downright static.
There is very little movement, and we could attribute probably a lot of
that to early sound camera issues which kept the actors practically bolted to
where the mic was. As it is, the sound
is scratchy and the film quality is somewhat poor.
I’ll Never Forget You takes up the script from the previous movie
and the stage play and to a much farther place, a poignant, dreamlike scenario
that is continually punctuated, as all time-travelers find out, with the
ultimate knowledge that the past wasn’t such a great place.
Tyrone Power meets the
family he’s pretending, as the 1784 Peter Standish, to marry into, and we can
see his interest, his sense of adventure, even his latent sense of humor
warming to the occasion. He has trouble
relating to people in his own time, but here he is allowed to be a different
man, and he bravely attempts sociability like a shy boy eager for friends at a
party.
Irene Browne plays Lady
Anne, Kate’s mother, who, like any good mother in a Jane Austen novel of the
period is desperately trying to marry off her daughters. Her husband is deceased and left them with
debts. Her rascal son, the indolent
gambler, drinker, and chaser of servant girls, Tom, is played with irresistible
panache by Colin-Keith Johnson.
“What do you call the
colonies now?” he asks Tyrone.
“The United States of
America.”
“Trifle pompous, don’t
you think? But after all, it’s only
temporary.” He refers to constantly
putting his boot-in-mouth, but we sense that saying the wrong thing at the
wrong time is Tom’s favorite hobby. He
is particularly pleased to have Tyrone marry his sister, because Peter Standish
is said to have 10,000 pounds a year income. Tom wants to mooch off him.
Then Tyrone is introduced
to the younger sister, Helen, about whom he knew nothing, as the original Peter
Standish did not write of her in his diary.
She is played here by Ann Blyth, who becomes an ally of Tyrone’s when
she generously covers for him as he blunders about knowing something he really can’t have
known. Before long their curiosity for
each other turns to love. At first she
resists, because he is to marry her sister, but when she learns from him—and
more importantly, believes—that he is a different Peter Standish from the
future—she allows herself to enjoy a sweet, passionate, and ultimately hopeless
love for him.
Miss Blyth is
fascinating to watch—all the cast are excellent—but she has a lot to convey and
make us believe and she has to do this under acting restrictions that the
other more emotional and physically expressive characters don’t have. Her character is sheltered, demure, gentle,
all qualities which can only be indicated by her posture, her voice, and
disciplined economy of movement. She
walks softly, sits and stands with a ramrod-straight back, lowers her eyes at
moments of mature discretion, a minimalist way of telling us who she is and what her world is like. Her lovely
face melts into a smirk at one of Tyrone’s naïve attempts to “catch on” to this
old way of life. She also has
intelligence, and a sense of humor, making her the most reasonable and capable
member of her family. In trusting Tyrone
and his tales of a future world, she is also the most courageous. Like Tyrone, she silently carries burdens,
the chief of which is the pressure by her mother to marry a much older man who
is also a self-important jerk.
He is played by Raymond
Huntley. Something about the voice was
tantalizingly familiar, and then I remembered him from the BBC series Upstairs/Downstairs. You’ll recall he was the family solicitor,
Sir Geoffrey. Here he is a man always
clinging to this family, trying to work his way in, and becomes jealous of
Tyrone’s easy friendship with the beautiful young woman he had culled out of
herd for himself. His resentment will
lead to revenge.
By the way, the role of
Helen was played on Broadway with Leslie Howard in 1928 by Margalo Gillmore,
who we met here as the superior officer in
Skirts Ahoy from 1952, the year after
I’ll
Never Forget You was released.
Tyrone navigates
through parties where he meets the greats of the age, including James Boswell
and Samuel Johnson, and sees enough of the wretched filthy streets of London, including
a glimpse of children being abused in a workhouse, to understand that life in
the 18th century was not without its misery. He becomes disillusioned.
He also makes more and more blunders, and
people begin to pull away from him in fear of his seeming ability to predict events. He
becomes just as isolated as he was in his lab (feeling comfortable in the lab
environment, he even attempts to recreate it by performing simple experiments
in a rented basement).
The date in Peter
Standish’s diary that marks the end of the adventure is drawing near, but
Tyrone does not want to leave Ann. The
authorities, when he has been accused of sorcery, will have the ultimate power
over him.
Director Roy Ward Baker
tells the story with exquisite cinematography and actors that are beautifully
choreographed, not just the requisite Austen-like ball scene, but in ordinary
circumstances. When Tyrone Power hands
Ann Blyth out of a coach, her long dress ripples to the ground, dripping down the metal
fold-out coach steps.
Shots of the rooms in
the house, the stairway, the halls, convey mood and the house becomes like
another character in the story. The
muted colors are lovely. A bowl of
colorful flowers catches our eye in the foreground as the actors stand behind,
held together by the pastoral scenes on the wallpapered panels in the
background. The outdoor shots of London
streets, of the quiet square, of the peaceful countryside, of Tyrone Power
gazing out the window at night with satisfaction on his first day in the Age of
Reason.
I like how Tyrone and
the other men have a slight five-o’clock shadow in the color sequences that
looks very much like men in the 18th century oil paintings. This is a really nice piece of detail. I don’t think this would have shown up well
in black and white.
There are some major
scenes that are handled differently in I’ll
Never Forget You than they were in Berkeley
Square, with very good effect, and turn the ending from a flat tragedy to a more
hopeful, romantic, if equally gut-wrenching ending.
First, the crux ansata (more
commonly known as an ankh) is a symbol of eternal life and was a trinket
brought back from Egypt by Helen’s deceased father. In Berkeley
Square, Leslie Howard has this item from the beginning of the story as
something he found in the house and wonders what it is. Later on in the story, when he is in 1784,
the Helen character shows it to him, and says she will leave it in the house as
a symbol of their eternal love and connection. At the end of the story, when he has returned
to 1933, he holds it mournfully as a symbol of his lost love.
I’ll Never Forget You uses the crux ansata in a more romantic and
suspenseful way, when at the point Ann Blyth realizes Tyrone Power must return
to his own time, she shows him the object, tells him of its significance, and
demonstrates that she will hide it in a secret compartment in a desk for him to
find one day as a reminder of her. At
the end of the story, when Tyrone is back in 1951, he has a fleeting few
time-travel hangover moments where he thinks his adventure was all a
hallucination.
Then—aha! He remembers the object, and runs to the
hiding place. He fumbles a few moments,
not able to locate the hidden drawer.
Will he find it? Is it there? Please let this not be a dream! (If we just wasted 90 minutes of our life on
a dream sequence we are not going to be happy.)
And then—bingo! His recovery of the
crux ansata is joyful.
Another scene played
very differently is when the Helen character, who hints that she has envisioned
Peter coming to her before they met—she had a vision of him walking down the
staircase holding a lighted candelabra as we saw him in modern times—and she
wants to see into the future.
She looks
into his eyes and through what is, I guess, meant to be a telepathic
communication between them, she sees fleeting images of his world as he thinks
of them.
In
Berkeley Square, Helen is played by Heather Angel (We last saw her here in
Cry Havoc), who though a
lovely young woman, has a bit of a deer-in-the-headlights look in this movie
which I think is meant to be shorthand for her soulfulness.
Her visions are splashed on the screen as
stock footage of skyscrapers, locomotives, racing cars (
racing cars?) biplanes, warships, gangsters, and finally World War
soldiers in gas masks, bayonets drawn, flamethrowers—and she is horrified.
“Devils! Devils!
God, would not put us here to suffer for a race of fiends like that to
come after us!”
Powerful sentiment, and
the image of gas masks, that iconic, ultimate horror of World War I, lingers even today
as we lately hear about the threat of chemical warfare.
I’ll Never Forget You has a drastically different take on this
scene. Instead of the horrors of World
War II and the nuclear age, Ann Blyth sees only beautiful cities lit by
electric lights in Tyrone Power’s dark, sad eyes. There is no stock footage superimposed over her beatific expression, we have only the trust we have invested in her, and the trust she has invested in him, to know that her wondrous visions are real. The message here is not to pound us with our
recent horrors, but to count our blessings.
“What a beautiful dream
of heaven. Who would want to leave a
world such as that?”
Tyrone returns to his
own world, by force, when magistrates drag him down the staircase, off to the
lunatic asylum, and we see a magnificent shot from Ann Blyth’s vantage point on
the upper landing to the hall below. The
great double doors close behind Tyrone Power and his captors.
Then more flashes of lightning, and the warm
colors fade into crisp black and white.
The door slowly opens again, and Tyrone is in modern dress, his hair
cropped, his arm tentatively reaching for the light switch. As he enters the house, looking all around at
these rooms that have not changed with the centuries, we hear a soft, plaintive
reprise of an 18th century flute piece. Truly, the past is alive around us if we are
perceptive to it.
How we perceive our own
times is the spectrum through which we judge the past. How fascinating that the modern Peter
Standish’s perspective of his own era (or rather, the filmmaker's perspective) could change so much in the eighteen
years from 1933 to 1951.
