Mervyn LeRoy (1942)

I think I saw Random Harvest in my teens and had never seen it again until now.  It was funny discovering what I remembered and had forgotten about this well-known amnesia-based movie (based on a 1941 novel by James Hilton).  I recalled little of the plot but the key locations were, for someone with next to no visual memory, surprisingly familiar – maybe it helps that shots of these locations begin and end the film.   Our first sight is of the dark approach to an asylum that houses variously traumatised Great War veterans:  the inmates include Ronald Colman, as a British officer who was gassed and shellshocked so badly that he can’t remember his name or identity.  Random Harvest ends in an idyllic Devon cottage, no less pretty for being a studio construction with a painted backdrop.  It’s in this home-sweet-home that the Colman character has enjoyed a brief perfect marriage with the film’s heroine, played by Greer Garson; it’s here too that, after years of separation of an extraordinary kind, they are properly reunited.

Colman, known in the asylum as John Smith, wanders out of the place on the evening of Armistice Day in November 1918 and into the nearby industrial town of Melbridge (somewhere in the Midlands).  In a pub there, he meets Paula Ridgeway (Garson), a member of a theatrical troupe performing in the town.  She immediately realises Colman is from the asylum; she almost immediately falls in love with him.  Anxious to protect ‘Smithy’, as she calls him, and to try to nurse him back to health, Paula abandons her performing career and takes him to stay in a quiet Devon village, where they soon marry and have a child.  Smithy takes to writing; he gets a few things published and is invited to an interview in Liverpool for a job on a newspaper there.  On a Liverpool street, he’s knocked down by a taxi and bumps his head in the fall.  When he comes round, he remembers who he was before his blackout in the trenches – his name is Charles Rainier, he’s the son of a wealthy businessman – but all memories of his life in the asylum, and with Paula and their infant son, have been wiped from his mind.   Charles travels from Liverpool to the Rainier family home, Random Hall, there to learn that his father’s funeral has just taken place.   Charles’s siblings are rather put out by his return at what is, from his point of view, a financially opportune time:  their father’s will is about to be read.  (For reasons I didn’t understand – or may have already forgotten – the siblings had presumed their missing-in-action brother long dead but their father, it seems, took a different view.)   Charles is keen to complete his university degree but, since his brother is a hopeless businessman, agrees to devote himself instead to the family firm and attempt to revive its fortunes.

He’s so successful that, a few years later, Charles Rainier is dubbed by a newspaper ‘the Industrial Prince of England’.  We see him in his impressive office, preparing to meet for lunch with his niece Kitty (Susan Peters), the stepdaughter of one of his siblings.   Charles speaks on the intercom to his secretary, Margaret Hanson, who then comes into the office.  Margaret is none other than Paula Ridgeway.  Since Smithy went off on his overnight trip to Liverpool, her life has been grim:  she tried without success to find her missing husband; her baby son died; she couldn’t get back into the theatre and got an office job instead.   One day, Margaret saw Charles Rainier’s photograph in a newspaper.   She applied successfully to be his PA but he didn’t then and doesn’t now recognise her.  In one of the weirdest bits of plotting in Random Harvest (the competition is fierce), Margaret has struck up a friendship with Jonathan Benet (Philip Dorn), a doctor at the asylum where Charles/John Smith was once a patient.  Benet advises Margaret (with whom he’s in love!) not to tell Charles that she’s his wife:  it might be counterproductive.  Kitty, infatuated with Charles since, as a fifteen-year-old, she first met him on his surprise return to Random Hall, has started writing him love letters.  Margaret, who sees which way the wind is blowing, helpfully arranges for Smithy to be declared legally dead and their marriage to be dissolved.  Charles and Kitty are engaged to be married.   A few days before their wedding, they go to the church to talk with the vicar about hymns; one of these triggers a memory in Charles.  His reaction is such as to make clear to Kitty that he loves another, and she tearfully breaks off the engagement.  Charles knows that he travelled to Random Hall from Liverpool seven years ago but doesn’t know why:  he belatedly returns to the city and Margaret goes too.  They visit the Adelphi Hotel, where he stayed for that one night, and find Smithy’s suitcase still waiting to be claimed in left luggage.   Charles doesn’t recognise it.

Charles is invited to stand for parliament as a Liberal candidate.  He accepts the invitation and is elected.   Margaret helps with the campaign and, at the House of Commons, he asks if she’ll marry him:  he explains that, as an MP, he needs a wife but that the marriage would be a practically convenient rather than a romantic arrangement.   Margaret, although distraught by the terms of Charles’s proposal, disappoints Dr Benet by accepting it.  The partnership is, to the outside world and from Charles’s perspective, a complete success.  Margaret is the perfect society hostess and his public standing continues to rise:  he receives a knighthood and acquires the reputation of being, as well as a highly successful businessman, a notably humane employer.  Margaret, however, is desperately and increasingly wretched.  With Charles’s agreement, she decides to go abroad for a time; without his knowledge, she spends a few days, before she’s due to sail, in the same Devon village where they were once happy.  She stays at the hotel that put her and Smithy up (in separate rooms) before their marriage.  Meanwhile, Charles is called upon to sort out a strike at the Melbridge Cable Works, which his company owns.  He administers his Midas touch and, job done, goes for a drink in a Melbridge pub before returning to London.  The combination of the once-familiar surroundings and the workers celebrating (as the crowds celebrated on that night in November 1918, when the war had ended) begins to unlock Charles’s amnesia.  On the subject of locks:  he has always kept a key that he found in his pocket when he came to in Liverpool after the traffic accident, although he’s never known what it’s the key to.  The memory-jogging in Melbridge leads Charles to Devon and, via the hotel where he and Paula stayed, to the cottage.  He recognises the creaking front gate, the overhanging blossom on the path to the door.  He turns the key and goes inside.  Margaret had been about to catch the boat train but, as she’s checking out of the hotel, she asked what happened to the previous hotelier.  That’s funny, says the new owner, someone else was asking that same question earlier today.  Margaret hotfoots it to the cottage and calls ‘Smithy!’ through the still-open door.  He turns to see her and cries ‘Paula!’   They embrace.  The End.

The plot sounds even more bonkers written down (at a length I never intended) than it seems while you’re watching Random Harvest. (Mervyn LeRoy was working with a screenplay adapted from the Hilton novel by Claudine West, George Froeschel and Arthur Wimperis.)  Seeing the film now is interesting largely because it makes you think about what it meant to those who first saw it in 1942.   The popular audience then wouldn’t have believed the story – as a sequence of credible events – any more than did the BFI audience of 2015.  (The film was screened as part of BFI’s ‘Power of Love’ season.)   Cinemagoers of seventy-plus years ago might have felt differently, though, in at least two important respects.  First, they might have been more inclined than today’s audience to see the film’s stars as two identities inevitably made for each other, according to the rules of the Hollywood game, and as thereby transcending considerations of real-life believability.   Second, an audience, during World War II, watching a story with its roots in World War I would, I think, have engaged more directly and deeply with the theme of prolonged and wrenching separation, the hope of eventual reunion.  Knowing the reality of life in wartime and accepting the formal requirements of the romantic drama, the original audience would have been better equipped to cope with Greer Garson’s suffering in silence – better able to accept that the suffering must continue until it’s time for the happy ending.

It was pretty hard for this present-day viewer even to feel that the ending was happy.   I got frustrated that Margaret didn’t try harder to get Charles to recognise her.   When he finally did, I still felt oppressed.  So much time had been lost and wasted – and Margaret would never be able to forget the lonely years of being in Charles’s company without his feeling much for her (and he might regret and feel guilty about that).  These are not two people who would know anywhere that they were soul mates:  they spend their daily lives together and he hasn’t a clue of who she once was to him.  It’s possible to see the story as an exaggerated but nonetheless frightening illustration of the discontinuity of personal identity and memory.  I realise I’m not responding in the ways the film-makers intended but elements of the movie that I don’t think I misread made matters worse from my point of view.  Random Harvest comes across as less preposterous when it’s most miserable:  Charles’s marriage proposal to Margaret is truly shocking (it would be startling enough even if they’d not been man and wife previously); and the scenes of their loveless married life are depressing because they convey a sense of settled routine.   And even the nonsense gets to you – especially that damned key.   Charles is never parted from it and, as he and Margaret sit in their box at the opera, he fingers the key reflectively.  A true masochist, she keeps her eyes trained on the opera.  I was disappointed too that Charles’s eventual retrieval of his past with Margaret was achieved in incremental drips rather than a blinding flash of recognition – I was hoping for another bang on the head that would somehow restore the three lost years as well as retain their before and after.

The two leads are better at different stages of the film.   Ronald Colman, fifty at the time, is much too old for the young man whose university career was interrupted by the Great War.  (It seems odd too, both in his pre-1918 life and when Kitty makes a play for him, that there’s no other woman in Charles’s life.  According to a TCM note on Random Harvest, included in the BFI programme note, this is a change from the novel:  the film-makers, alert to the Production Code, had to ‘eliminate [Charles’s] first wife, which [sic] would have made him a bigamist [when he married Paula]’.)  Colman nevertheless plays the wrecked amnesiac John Smith very sensitively.  He looks right for the older Charles but is less expressive in the second half of the film – inevitably so, when the script requires his character to remain in the emotional dark until the eleventh hour.  Greer Garson, though she performs Paula’s saucy stage routine with aplomb, is too grand for the music hall.  She’s a lot more persuasive as Margaret, both the efficient secretary and the gallantly suffering professional wife.  The scene in which Kitty realises Charles doesn’t love her and renounces her claim on him is a silly conception but Susan Peters plays it very well and touchingly.  Colman is good here too – Charles, standing face to face with Kitty, looks at her as if from miles away.

29 October 2015