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Friday, August 20, 2021

IF WINTER COMES (1947)

Deadly, dated & airless, this romance feels like it spent a long time in ‘development hell’ at M-G-M’s story department.  (Was it planned to follow Ronald Colman’s wildly successful RANDOM HARVEST/’42?  If so, they never did lick the ending, missing the obvious one with elderly Dame May Whitty rising from her sickbed at the climax to testify at an inquest and straighten everything out.)  As it stands, Walter Pidgeon, 50 and looking it (it's his last leading man role sans Greer Garson), plays opened-minded man in closed-minded town, emotionally re-engaging with old love Deborah Kerr years after they’ve both married others.  Not that Pidgeon’s current wife Angela Lansbury worries, she’s confident of her place in his life, but less so when he proves too sympathetic to young Janet Leigh: single, pregnant, with the expected child’s unnamed father doing WWII service.  And not only Lansbury; soon the whole town is talking gossip before real tragedy brings it all to a head at the inquest.  As presented, easily disproved innuendo between Pidgeon & Leigh little more than an open & shut case of circumstantial stupidity.  Rather than getting P.O.’d at the town’s intolerance, you may want to strangle those responsible for story construction & script.  Still, you can just see how this might have worked (see suggested casting & denouement above).  But under Victor Saville’s square megging, too tasteful for melodrama, nothing catches fire and the film offers little but a weird tone to show for its troubles.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Bland as this is, the seeds of a mutually dependent marriage of incompatibility between Lansbury & Pidgeon, as seen in the first act, has real (if missed) possibilities.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Check out Lillian Hellman/William Wyler’s THESE THREE/’36 to see how these things should play out.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/05/these-three-1936.html

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