Ten years after her husband’s suicide left a pile of debt, two step-kids to raise and loads of personal guilt (intimations on a lack of intimacy poking thru Production Code euphemisms), Claudette Colbert is finally starting to pick up the pieces for a new life & an old romance. But first, she’ll have to solve the psychological mess of emotionally stunted step-daughter June Allyson*, a sheltered girl who idolizes a false image of her very troubled father. Hey!, not a bad set up for one of those psychological thrillers so popular in the mid-‘40s. Too bad the film’s such a dog. Not a believable moment in here as interventionist shrink Lionel Barrymore tells Claudette how to get Allyson away from her late Dad’s piano-mania (for Liszt, Chopin & Debussy) and into the game of life. A strategy that backfires when the teenager ignores suitable suitor Marshall Thompson and imagines life with Pop’s old pal Walter Pidgeon who’s already got his eye on Claudette. Everyone’s has to go brain-dead to make this one work, slumbering in the dull, comfy M-G-M house-style favored by vet staff director Robert Z. Leonard.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Flunking her first meaty dramatic role, Allyson seems less emotionally disturbed basket-case than spoiled/self-centered brat.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Switch to Colbert in another 1946 film, torn between Orson Welles’ Old World scientist and George Brent’s New World entrepreneur, in the gobsmacking melodrama of Irving Pichel’s irresistible TOMORROW IS FOREVER. Welles’ biggest hit as an actor in his (anti)glamor-boy Hollywood days. OR: For more classical piano with suicide & psychology, try James Mason & Ann Todd in THE SEVENTH VEIL/’45, an obvious influence here.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: There must have been a naughty boy in the M-G-M music department as the Chopin Nocturne played by Allyson (Op. 27, no. 2 in D-flat) is the one that famously ends with a musical representation of the post-coital sighs of Chopin’s lover, authoress George Elliot. (That’s one way to get around the old Hollywood Production Code.) Here’s Arthur Rubinstein at 75 in a rare clip from Moscow/1964; the sound crumbly, the performance incandescent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7f6Bs3TPYQ
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