Try to imagine that you are the very beautiful star of a musical theater troupe and happen to be in a small tobacconist shop. You recognize that the other customer, a tongue-tied man in an army uniform, must have escaped from the local asylum. What do you do? If the answer is to take him under your wing, take him with you, and flee with a man who doesn't even know who he is, giving up your job, you may find "Random Harvest" heartwarming. There are still more obstacles to finding it believable, however. For instance, how about your husband, the father of your infant son, disappears one day, you find him, and don't tell him "We're like married"?
It's been a long time since I saw "Lost Horizons," the movie version of another once popular James Hilton novel, also starring Ronald Colman, but that movie about a fantasy land (Shangri-La) seems in retrospect more plausible than "Random Harvest" does. I find the behavior of Greer Garson's character(s) mostly unbelievable. I will readily stipulate that she was very beautiful. Though I am not mesmerized by her lower lip (which distracted Grouch from noticing how preposterous the movie is), I was surprised that she had legs, not remembering them being on display in any of the other movies in which I've seen her. Certainly not in a mini-skirt-length kilt! And there is the rapt attention about which Grouch wrote so eloquently that she turns on Ronald Colman.
Pauline Kael pronounced Garson "one of the most richly syllabled queenly horrors" on movie screens. I guess her nearly pathological nobility is what Kael meant by "queenly," and her elocution was very grand, but "horror"? Maybe because (untypically) the first movie in which I saw Garson (decades after it was released: I'm not that old!) was her break-out Elilzabeth Bennett in the 1940 "Pride and Prejudice," I am predisposed to be sympathetic to the characters she played in other movies. I know that some find "Mrs. Miniver" insufferable, but not me, and I don't really see what she could have done with her role in "Random Harvest" to make it more believable. She certainly manages to look adoringly at the man who doesn't remember having married her.
That man is Ronald Colman, perhaps the most consistently gallant star of Hollywood's golden era (or, indeed, in the whole history of movies). The apogee of Colman's gallantry was as Sydney Carton in "A Tale of Two Cities," but even when he was being raffish (If I Were King, Kismet) he projected an innate gallantry. In "Random Harvest," his proposal of marriage to his devoted secretary is gallant (indeed, all three proposals of marriage he makes during the movie are), and his ungallant behavior results from amnesia (two separate cases of it within three years, with the second one being accompanied by total recall of what was lost the first time).
Colman was Garson's match in mellifluous elocution, so that "Random Harvest" has some of the most beautifully pronounced corny dialogue ever. Colman and Susan Peters, both of whom received Oscar nominations for their parts (Garson was winning an Oscar as "Mrs. Miniver" for 1942) do all that can reasonably be expected of those given the lines and behavior of Hilton's characters. Plus there are some veteran character actors popping up.
I guess I have made it clear that I was unable to suspend disbelief in what happens in "Random Harvest" to wallow in the emotions. My eyes remained dry. I also found the exterior shots blatantly phony and the interiors of the cottage the happy couple rented far too grand for the economic position (typical MGM prettifying of poverty). I was not particularly impressed by Joseph Ruttenberg's cinematography (he won one of his Oscars that year for "Mrs. Miniver," which swept the Oscars; "Random Harvest" had seven nominations and no winners).
For a World War I post-traumatic stress, I'd recommend Behind the Lines, instead, though it is far inferior to Pat Barker's "Regeneration" trilogy on which it is based. For Garson, "Pride and Prejudice" remains my recommendation; for Colman, "A Tale of Two Cities"; and James Hilton? I guess "Good-bye, Mr. Chips" or "Mrs. Miniver" (both starring Greer Garson).
Oh, yes, and why does it drag on for more than two hours?
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