Classic Cinema: Random Harvest (1942) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of MGM and Warner Brothers

Actor-director-producer Mervyn LeRoy was one of the longest running great stock trade directors turned master filmmaking craftsmen to emerge out of the late 1920s, working from vaudevillian silent comedies all the way up to the 1960s.  Akin to Michael Curtiz, Robert Wise or Ronald Neame, the film worker who jumped back and forth between Warner Brothers and MGM over the next few decades with probably his most famous effort being serving as producer of The Wizard of Oz from 1939.  

While delivering one of the most famous gangster films of all time with the Edward G. Robinson starring Little Caesar, it was around the 1940s the director paired up with not one but four films with British actress Greer Garson designed to appeal to English markets during the Second World War.  The most notable of which was an adaptation of Goodbye Mr. Chips author James Hilton’s 1941 novel Random Harvest, a post-WWI romantic drama which paired Garson with Ronald Colman and was among the first films to properly address the wartime problem of shellshocked amnesia.

 
In the waning days of WWI, a nameless British officer suffering from amnesia after being gassed in the trenches dubbed ‘John Smith’ (Ronald Colman) turns up in a British asylum.  When the war ends, Smith walks out the front door of the asylum and wanders off, crossing paths with a stage performer named Paula Ridgeway (Greer Garson) who takes him under her wing and soon they fall in love and marry, rooming at a small cottage with their young son.  

But after an opportunity to pursue a writing career in Liverpool ends in a car accident, his past memory banks are jogged and his memory of being Charles Rainier a wealthy heir to a profitable business and his newly formed memories as ‘John Smith’ have subsequently been erased.  Desperate to find out what happened to her husband, Paula tracks Charles down to his office and takes up a job as his secretary under her biological name Margaret Hanson, hopeful her presence around him will trigger memories of their marriage.

 
A study of postwar amnesia and/or PTSD and displaced memory banks as well as a testament to the power of love trying to work through all of these confounding psychological loopholes, the film adapted by Arthur Wimperis, George Froeschel and Claudine West differs from the novel some in revealing Margaret Hanson to be Paula Ridgeway early on rather than keeping it a surprise.  The film also utilizes flashbacks hinting at some of Charles Rainier’s combat experiences that led to his shell shocking.  

In Mervyn LeRoy’s hands, the film is a sweeping postwar romance filled with great longing and passion as our dedicated heroine Paula/Margaret sticks through time and tide to get back with her husband who continues to get further lost within himself.  Ronald Colman though older looking than Greer Garson does a solid job conveying the deer-in-headlights look of confusion and uncertainty as though something is amiss but the man can’t quite put his finger on why.  Garson of course is fantastic though she would win the Academy Award that same year for another film Mrs. Miniver.  Also fans of It's a Wonderful Life actor Henry Travers as Dr. Sims.

 
Given an evocative original score by The Wizard of Oz composer Herbert Stothart, Random Harvest from the outset and even through its whimsical romance carries an air of melancholy.  For all of the warmth on display, raging quietly in the epicenter is a sense of anxiety as though the wartime demons that haunted Charles Rainer are far from leaving him alone.  Then there’s Ukrainian born Brigadoon cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg’s smoky, romantically foggy camerawork reminiscent of David Lean’s Brief Encounter or Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman.  Stylistically the film does a good job of creating open opacity for the protagonist’s lack of direction or purpose before shifting gears into a picturesque portrait of organized, compartmentalized luxury. 
 
Produced around $1.2 million, the film became a massive commercial success at the box office, raking in around $8 million and garnering seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress Susan Peters as Charles Rainier’s former love interest Kitty.  Sadly the film didn’t win any of the nominations and critics were all but underwhelmed by the somber tragicomic postwar melodrama.  In the years since however, including but not limited to the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Passions list and the emergence of several Indian and Pakistani remakes, Random Harvest has found its rightful place in the canon of all time great screen romances.  

Certainly among the best postwar films leading up to William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, Mervyn LeRoy’s underrated romantic epic seen now is every bit as achingly desperately longing for lost love now as it was when audiences first saw it in 1942.  Though the film would be overshadowed by other adaptations of James Hilton’s novels, it nevertheless remains an important chapter in LeRoy’s as well as Garson’s illustrious careers.

--Andrew Kotwicki