Random Harvest (1942)

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

Whenever Debra and I happen upon a movie like today’s Film of the Week, we have a standing jest that comes from Ricky Ricardo’s comic mispronunciations of English in the old I Love Lucy show: “The man’s got magnesia!” Of course, Ricky meant amnesia, which would require the services of what Ricky, dazed by the English spelling, once called a “physikee-a-trist,” that is, to use the technical term, a shrink. Complete forgetting of your past and your identity is exceedingly rare, but it does happen, and in any case, it can be a terrific premise for a movie. I’ve defined irony, even ironies that seem no more than slight verbal twists, as essentially dramatic, involving a perceived incongruity of levels of knowledge, in a situation of some subtlety: as when a professor, discoursing about irony as he walks down the street with a student who obviously wants to be done with the conversation, does not notice the banana peel two steps in front of him, while the student does notice it, and we in the audience notice that he notices it, and then — whoops! And magnesia — wait, I mean amnesia, the wholesale breach in a person’s lived remembrance — has the potential for acute dramatic irony all the way through.

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The setup for our film, Random Harvest, is awry from the start. A British soldier recuperating from poison gas inhaled in the “war to end all wars” (Ronald Colman, whose work we admire here at Word and Song) cannot remember who he is. He can’t even remember his own name. So of course he’s assigned the most nondescript of all English names: John Smith. And, of course, he falls in love, in his case with Paula, a singer in a traveling troupe (Greer Garson, another of our favorites), and they end up marrying and living in a small cottage in the countryside. Paula is her stage name. She calls him “Smithy.” But who was he? What was he? We don’t know. Not until one day, when he is off in Liverpool to apply for a job writing for a newspaper, he is struck by a car, and when he recovers from that injury, he remembers his past life, except all the events that have occurred since the gassing. It is again amnesia, but of the recent past rather than the distant past. In fact, he is Charles Rainier, the son of an important businessman, who has just passed away. Charles takes up the business with energy and intelligence, and becomes an industrial giant, a patriotic and beneficent one. Nothing in his pockets when he was hit provides any strong clue of anything otherwise.

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James Hilton, author of the story that inspired the film, wrote in a wistfully British way about loyalty against all odds, or complete devotion of your life to something good and beautiful, even if you get no notice of it. And that’s what is in play in Random Harvest. We must look at the amnesia as a given; what’s really important is the self-sacrifice that Paula shows, she who waited for Smithy to come back from Liverpool, and he never did. She finds him again, but she is advised by a psychiatrist (Philip Dorn, whom you may remember as the gentle-spoken father in, well, I Remember Mama), himself is in love with her, that revealing herself to Mr. Charles Rainier may precipitate a mental and emotional breakdown. So she does what she can: she becomes Charles’ secretary, under her given name, which he does not know.

I won’t reveal what happens. I will say that our director, Mervyn le Roy, was, with Leo McCarey, one of Hollywood’s finest portrayers of that quiet form of charity that has no name, but something like “tact” expresses part of it, or “delicacy” (except that it requires great inner strength). It doesn’t blow up bridges, or run across a field raving, or snarl and snap at enemies; its whole suspense is interior. And it makes sense only to a people who still believe in that love that, as someone wiser than I am put it, “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

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We were not able to find a free version of our film for this week, but here is a trailer as a little introduction to a very worthwhile film.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and on-demand access to our full archive, and may add their comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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