Under the bluebirds

June Lockhart died last year at the age of 100. For some reason I thought I mentioned the programming tribute TCM gave to her a some months back, but a search of the blog says I didn't. In any case, I had a movie with her in it on my DVR which TCM ran before she died, but which I didn't get around to watching until rather more recently, largely because I didn't realize she had a role in it: The White Cliffs of Dover.

The star here is Irene Dunne, and as the movie opens she's working as a nurse in Britain named Susan Ashwood, tending to the soldiers who are returning home from wherever it is they were bravely fighting World War II. (The movie was released a few weeks before the D-Day invasion, so perhaps these were bomber crews or people evacuated from North Africa.) Once again, as you might guess, she's about to have a flashback as to how she wound up in the situation she's in....

Let's go back to the spring of 1914. Obviously, if you know your history, you'll know that this would be shortly before World War I began in Europe, although of course it would be a good three years before that piece of shit Woodrow Wilson got the US involved in the war. Susan, at the time Susan Dunn, is traveling on an ocean liner with her father Hiram Dunn (Frank Morgan) over to England to spend a couple of months on vacation where they'll be staying with Col. Forsythe (C. Aubrey Smith) and his family. While there, Forsythe introduces Susan to a nice youngish nobleman, Sir John Ashwood (Alan Marshal). The two have a bit of a romance, although there's the question of whether it can work out since Hiram expects his daughter to return to America with him.

Susan eventually decides more or less to elope with Sir John instead of going back to America, but she has the great bad luck of marrying John just as war is being declared between Britain and Germany. Sir John comes from a long line of men who did military service, so of course he gets mobilized, and it's off to those horrid trenches of France for him to fight.

Lots of time passes, and Sir John gets brief leave as part of a program to reunite men in service with their wives, which brings Susan to Normandy for an all-too-brief weekend together. And wouldn't you know it, but a) Susan gets knocked up that weekend, and b) it's the same time that the US announces its entry into the Great War. Sadly, Sir John won't survive the war, leaving Susan a widow and mother, but a wealthy one.

Susan's son, John II (played by Roddy McDowall as a boy and Peter Lawford as an adult), grows up on the estate next to that of the Kenneys, who have a daughter his age named Betsy (played by Elizabeth Taylor as an adolescent and June Lockhart as an adult). They're going to fall in love but, as the 1930s go on Susan understands that there's another war coming and dammit, she doesn't want her son to be involved. She already gave up one man for Britain and she's not about to give up a second. Young John, however, intends to uphold the family tradition of going into military service. Since this movie was released in the spring of 1944, and since the story is told in flashback, you know whether mother or son is going to be the one to get their way.

To me The White Cliffs of Dover was one of those obvious message movies where the point of it is to show Americans at home why the US is fighting in Europe, and why they were making the sacrifices that they were. There's nothing subtle about this one at all, and that may affect your opinion on how good the movie is or isn't. It's almost as though Mrs. Miniver wasn't enough for MGM and they had to come up with more pro-Britain stuff.