Movie and Book Comments

Random Harvest (1942)

Directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Stars
Ronald Colman, Greer Garson and Susan Peters.

Based on the Novel by James Hilton

TCM showed this movie last night. It's pretty good, but not one one-thousandth as good as the book. So Please Don't Watch It until after you've read the book, which is one of my favorite novels of all time.

Greer Garson was beautiful, but looked about 40 years old, and Ronald Colman looked every bit of an ill-preserved 65. The movie was mostly doom-and-gloom, except for the mushy hearts and flowers and gingerbread cottages. The book isn't like that at all.

The movie begins in 1917, the day that World War I ended. A veteran is in a mental hospital in England because he was wounded and lost his memory and all his identification. He doesn't know who he is, but he knows he isn't insane, so one night he just walks away from the hospital.

The book begins years afterward, and much of the background story is told in flashbacks. In contrast to the movie, there is at least one event in this book that is so funny, I laughed like a crazy person the first time I read it. And the romances are so poignant as to add touches of sadness. There's a priest who is a perverse and delightful character, but he wasn't in the movie.

Please don't read the Reader's Digest condensed version. The real thing isn't a big book. James Hilton also wrote Good-Bye, Mr. Chips and Lost Horizon. Random Harvest is better than both of those put together.