RANDOM HARVEST
US, 1942, 126 minutes, Black and white.
Ronald Colman, Greer Garson, Philip Dorn, Susan Peters.
Directed by Mervyn Le Roy.
Random Harvest is one of the most entertaining films made by M.G.M. in the early forties. Greer Garson had made her mark at M.G.M. with Goodbye Mr Chips and in her teamings with Walter Pidgeon like Blossoms in the Dust and, especially, her Oscar-winning Mrs Miniver. Here she is teamed with elegant British actor Ronald Colman who was so popular from his many roles in the thirties including Tale of Two Cities, Lost Horizon, The Light That Failed. They are cast in a James Hilton story (Hilton being the author of Goodbye Mr Chips and Lost Horizon).
While the credibility of the plot might be difficult to accept, once it is on the screen presented in its sentimental vividness, the audience can accept it, become involved and feel very much for the central characters. Director Mervyn Le Roy (who was to direct a number of Greer Garson' s films) moves his two stars through the story with, great feeling, sentiment and appeal to audience involvement. The film has become a romantic classic.
1. What did the title mean?
2. How moving a film was this? What emotional effect did it have? How effective was the treatment? Was it too sentimental? Or did it
achieve a right balance of sentiment and feeling?
3. The background of war and fate and memory? How effective? (The war setting, considering that the film was released in 1942 – its impact then? Now?
4. With whom did you identify more, with Charles or with Paula?
5. What kind of person was Charles? What impression did he first make in the asylum and in his escape? Did you sense Paula’s response as genuine? Why did she want to help him? Was he the kind of person one would like to help? Happy that they married? The picture of their married life – too idyllic? Or was it well presented and then well shattered?
6. What was the impact of the Liverpool sequence and Smithy’s accident?
7. How was Charles Rennier a different person from Smithy? How similar? Were you glad that he found his past again? That he was a Rennier? What impression did his family give at the breakfast sequence? Glad that Charles found a new life and work? That he succeeded so well – or did this spoil him from the Smithy that we knew? The emotional effect of seeing him involved with Kitty? Was she entitled to chase him so much? And he to respond? How effective was the technique of showing the passing of the years via the pictures of Kitty? Did you hope that he would not marry her? The effect of the sequence in the chapel with the hymns? How admirable was Kitty in sensing that she should not marry him? Audience relief?
8. Was the film successful in not showing anything about Paula during the intervening years? How did it add to expectations on Paula and sympathies with her feelings?
9. Surprise that Paula-Margaret? entered into Charles’s life again? How had she changed? Audience glad that she became his secretary? Sorry that he did not recognise her? How strongly did audiences identify with her in her attempts to make him remember?
10. Audience response to him as a politician? That he married Margaret? Was their arrangement satisfactory? Why could Paula enter into this kind of arrangement? How did the sequence of the party and the aftermath with the jewels reveal the basic unhappiness of this arrangement? Could Paula have gone on with this for the rest of her life?
11. Did the resolution rely too much on coincidence? Did this matter?
12. What effect did Charles’s rediscoveries of his life have? The final sequence with Paula saying “Smithy” and Charles saying her name? A happy ending, a moving ending?
13. How did the personalities of Greer Garson and Ronald Colman have so much impact on the audience – in their day? Now?
