The setup for our film, Random Harvest, is awry from the start. A British soldier recuperating from poison gas inhaled in the “war to end all wars” (Ronald Colman, whose work we admire here at Word and Song) cannot remember who he is. He can’t even remember his own name. So of course he’s assigned the most nondescript of all English names: John Smith. And, of course, he falls in love, in his case with Paula, a singer in a traveling troupe (Greer Garson, another of our favorites), and they end up marrying and living in a small cottage in the countryside. Paula is her stage name. She calls him “Smithy.” But who was he? What was he? We don’t know. Not until one day, when he is off in Liverpool to apply for a job writing for a newspaper, he is struck by a car, and when he recovers from that injury, he remembers his past life, except all the events that have occurred since the gassing. It is again amnesia, but of the recent past rather than the distant past. In fact, he is Charles Rainier, the son of an important businessman, who has just passed away. Charles takes up the business with energy and intelligence, and becomes an industrial giant, a patriotic and beneficent one. Nothing in his pockets when he was hit provides any strong clue of anything otherwise. (Read more.)
Share
No comments:
Post a Comment