Smilin' Through (1932)

One of the TCM Spotlights in December was remakes, and one of the movies I hadn't mentioned here before is Smilin' Through, which has been done multiple times, although the one I DVRed was the 1932 talkie. (The sub-theme that day was movies with musical remakes, allowing TCM to show the 1941 version with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy.)

Leslie Howard plays Sir John Carteret, who at the start of the movie is mourning the love of his life, a young woman named Moonyeen (Norma Shearer) who died tragically young many years earlier, back in 1868. We then see that she's a ghost, so there's some unresolved issue in her life/afterlife/death, however you wish to put it.

Cut to about 1897. Relatives Sir John hasn't seen in ages have died, and they left behind a young orphaned girl Kathleen. John takes her in, although he's continuing to mourn for Moonyeen. Fast forward many more years, to 1915, and Kathleen has grown up to be played as an adult by Norma Shearer, so of course John notices the similarity in Kathleen's and Moonyeen's appearance.

One day Kathleen is riding around and ends up at an abandoned estate where two friends show up: Kenneth Wayne (Fredric March), and his friend Willie. There's a war on over on the continent, and both of these young men are going to be fighting in it. But Kathleen falls in love with Kenneth anyway.

Unfortunately, there's a problem with her choice of romantic partners. When Sir John meets Kenneth, he realizes Kenneth looks exactly like his father Jeremy (also played by Fredric March). Jeremy was Sir John's romantic rival for Moonyeen, and when Moonyeen decided to marry John, Jeremy responded by killing Moonyeen on her wedding day. (It's more ironic than rain.)

This explains why Sir John has been so bitter all his life, and why he decides to be such a jerk to Kenneth and Kathleen. If Kenneth's father was a jerk, then Kenneth needs to be made to suffer for it, just so Sir John can be happy that he's utterly screwed somebody's life over. And if he has to screw his foster daughter too, oh well. Thankfully for everybody Kenneth goes off to France and suffers a serious injury that makes him not want to see Kathleen ever again because he stupidly thinks Kathleen is going to suffer by seeing him injured.

Smilin' Through might be a good movie, but it's not the sort of movie geared to somebody like me. It probably belongs on the Hallmark Channel or Lifetime Channel instead. The male characters had motivations that made me want to pull my hair out, while Shearer overacts shamelessly, going into ridiculous histrionics. People who want a romantic tear-jerker are going to love this one, as it does what it does quite well. It just wasn't my cup of tea.

So even more than some movies I don't like, Smilin' Through is definitely one that you need to watch for yourself and draw your own conclusions about.