So Well Remembered

Another older movie before I go back to a couple of days of more recent movies. This time, it's the 1947 British movie So Well Remembered. It's based on a novel by James Hilton, who also serves as the narrator of the movie. But for reasons I'll get to later, the movie isn't as well remembered as the movies based on Hilton's other works.

The movie opens up in the mill town of Browdley, somewhere in the north of England, right at the end of World War II. Germany has just officially surrendered, and pretty much everybody in town is celebrating, with the exception of the town's mayor, George Boswell (John Mills). George enters the town hall, sees a portrait of himself on the wall, and begins to get rather nostalgic, in order that we may get a flashback to tells us the whole story. What an original plot device!

At any rate, the movie goes back to 1919, when Boswell was only the editor of the local newspaper. The town was then, as now (well, now being the 1945 at the start of the movie), dominated by the mills, which employed a lot of people, but in jobs that paid just enough for the workers to live in the sort of housing that more forward-thinking people railed against, saying that they were unsanitary and leading to a public health crisis. One of the mills has been run for a long time by the Channing family, with Olivia Channing (Martha Scott) being the heir to the fortune. However, Dad is facing legal issues, and before he can go to jail, he's killed in a car accident on a washed-out road.

Boswell feels bad for Olivia, and falls in love with her. Boswell has a good friend in the form of Dr. Whiteside (Trevor Howard) who, like Lionel Barrymore's character in One Man's Journey, has a foster daughter in the form of Julie Morgan (the adult Julie during the World War II years being played by Patricia Roc). The good doctor has come down quite a ways in life, feeling responsible for Mr. Channing's death, knows that Olivia is bad news for Boswell, but Boswell is in love and not thinking clearly. Further, after getting married, he's able to make the acquaintance of the powerful, leading to his running for the House of Commons and getting elected.

But Browdley still has those unhygienic houses, and sure enough, that eventually leads to a diphtheria epidemic, this being the days before it was common to vaccinate everybody against the disease. Dr. Whiteside saw it coming, but nobody believed him. And when Olivia refuses to take her kid to the free clinic to get an inoculation, you know the poor kid is going to get the disease and die, leading to her and Boswell getting a divorce.

Boswell resigns from the House of Commons, deciding instead to concentrate his political career on more local matters, eventually becoming mayor, which you know is going to happen because he's mayor at the start of the movie. Boswell becomes mayor just before the start of World War II, which is of course going to change everybody's lives dramatically. For the most part, it only means privation for the good people of Browdley, not the bombing raids people in London and other places suffered. But it also brings the reopening of the Channing mill, since the UK needs the cotton production.

So Boswell meets Olivia for the first time in ages. In the meantime, Olivia got remarried and had a son, Charles (Richard Carlson), who is much too old for the timeline to work out properly, but just ignore that. Charles, being a twenty-something Briton, has joined the RAF as his part of the war effort. But he gets shot down, and sent to a hospital in the Browdley area to recuperate. There, he meets... Julie, who is doing her part by becoming a nurse. They fall in love, but Mom is none too pleased at this relationship.

I mentioned at the top that the movie isn't so well remembered. That's because it was a box-office failure in the UK. The opening titles on TCM's print show it as a partnership between J. Arthur Rank and RKO; Dory Schary decided to shelve the picture in the US and it was out of circulation for over 50 years. That's a shame, since John Mills gives a pretty good performance.

However, it's understandable why the movie failed at the box office. It doesn't have quite the production values of the other British studios, and has a female lead who turns out to be too nasty for the movie's own good. I don't know if British audiences on the movie's original release noticed the same timeline problems I did.

Still, even with all the film's flaws, So Well Remembered is one of those films that's worth at least one viewing, if only to see where it went wrong.