DAVID O. SELZNICK’s first movie production since “Gone with the Wind” runs on forever like most of his productions (the best of which, to my knowledge, is still his first, “King Kong”), is characteristically crammed with famous movie names from Shirley Temple to Lionel Barrymore, and is described in its foreword as being a story about that “indestructible fortress, the American Home, 1943.” The title of the picture is “Since You Went Away” and the fortress in it belongs to the Hiltons, who are a pretty, pie-faced mother (Claudette Colbert), her two pretty, pie-faced daughters, aged 17 (Jennifer Jones) and 13 (Shirley Temple), and their father, who is away at war during all of the film but is seen almost as often as they are—as Neil Hamilton, in the several hundred photographs they have of him around the house. The authors, Margaret Buell Wilder and Mr. Selznick, paw over his family’s wartime existence with an idolizing belief and love that should satisfy even the devotion of the husband.
“Since You Went Away” holds religiously to a philosophy consisting in the ideas that only happy, virtuous or funny things happen in the American home, that only the pretty and the brave live there, that any complications should be more than balanced by happy rewards. This is symbolically expressed in the ending, on Christmas Eve, when the mother receives word that her husband, who has been reported missing, is safe and returning home. I suspect that the daughter’s fiancé (Robert Walker) was unconsciously made less handsome and less heroic to soften the effect of his really being killed.
In the hands of anyone as scrupulously conscientious about showing the American home as Selznick is in this picture the material things that make it up are interestingly accurate. He is finicky enough about almost any object that would go into middle-class life, from the kind of chenille spread you would find on the parents’ bed to the kind of sprinkler that would be on the front lawn: but he is fiendishly finicky about mementoes—there are as many of these as there are conceivable places to put them, and among the bronzed baby shoes, the pottery knickknacks, the newspaper clippings, are some more strikingly accurate perceptions, like the kind of poem the husband would write in the kind of handwriting he would have, and the kind of leather family album he would paste it in. These details are good up to the point where their placement in the scene, the amount of wear and tear on them or the way the camera looks at them, are supposed to reveal the nature of the Hiltons’ lives. At that point everything turns up either store fresh or, if worn and used, still photographed, posed and lighted to look new and gets the same negative quality pawnshop objects take on when they have been cleaned up and divorced from their old environment.
This denatured realism shows up with an even stranger effect in the story and the uses Selznick makes of it. He has a commendable desire to show all sides of the war on the home front, even the less agreeable. But of all scenes he might have picked in a rehabilitation hospital where wounded men are being taught to use their artificial limbs, he chooses that of the patients being given ice-cream cones—which would have been a neat irony if it hadn’t been figured just as a pretty thing to be going on at the moment. In another scene the irony is intended, but again muffled and practically negated: a banker on a delayed train complains of how much the delay is costing him; the soldier next to him holds up the stub of an arm and says he doesn’t mind it, he has plenty of time—and then the whole thing is wreathed in the soldier’s beatific smile and contentment. There are a number of tours taken through civilian centers like railroad stations and cocktail bars where bits of conversation are caught on the sound track, but cuteness comprises about three-quarters of these fragments of talk.
As a whole, the picture is as doughy and inconsequential as the bread you get in grocery stores, partly for the above reasons and also because of the cautious, narrow level that the people are held at. The older daughter’s adolescent agonies are made much of, but only in the form of a cute distress, Joseph Cotten’s interest in her, which is supposed to be that of an eternal rake, and ought to cause some poignant sexual difficulties in the girl, remains at a vapid level to preserve the less awkward elements in his personality, the event itself and the general graceful tone of the whole picture. For its length, this is as ineffectual a movie as I ever saw.
July 17, 1944