Since You Went Away **** (1944, Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Shirley Temple, Agnes Moorehead, Monty Woolley, Lionel Barrymore, Guy Madison, Robert Walker, Keenan Wynn, Nazimova, Hattie McDaniel) – Classic Movie Review 4573

Director John Cromwell’s lavish, star-studded 1944 tearjerker boasts winning performances from the superb cast and a poignant, fragrant whiff of the wartime mid-Forties.

Producer David O Selznick’s patriotic tribute to the American home front during World War Two stars Claudette Colbert as middle-class mother Mrs Anne Hilton, who battling against the anguish of wartime on the home front along with her daughters Jane (Jennifer Jones) and Bridget (Shirley Temple) after the family father is called up to fight in the war. This idealised, happy family has time for shortages, rationing, soldiers, refugees, war work, lodger Colonel Smollett (Monty Woolley), and Jane’s spot of romance, too.

It also stars Joseph Cotten as Lieutenant Tony Willett, Agnes Moorehead, Lionel Barrymore, Guy Madison, Robert Walker, Keenan Wynn and Nazimova, while Hattie McDaniel rises above her inevitable casting as the family’s maid.

There is a superb production by Selznick, who also wrote the screenplay, based on the book by Margaret Buell Wilder. Max Steiner’s music won an Oscar (his third) for Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture and Stanley Cortez and Lee Garmes’s nominated black and white cinematography should have won an Oscar. The score was the only Oscar, with eight other nominations, including Best Picture.

The lovely Art Direction and Interior Decoration are by Mark-Lee Kirk and Victor A Gangelin.

Also in the cast are Lloyd Corrigan, Albert Basserman [Bassermann], Craig Stevens, Jackie Moran, Jonathan Hale, Theodore von Eltz, Doodles Weaver, Ruth Roman, Dorothy Garner, Florence Bates, Jane Devlin, Ann Gillis, Byron Foulger, Edwin Maxwell, Warren Hymer, Rhonda Fleming, Andrew McLaglen, Terry Moore, George Chandler and Addison Richards.

The film pairs Jones and Cotten as a hit star team for the first of four times, followed by Love Letters (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946) and Portrait of Jennie (1948).

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4573

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