Everyone remembers their first kiss and their "first" time and for me this movie represents my first movie that I can actually remember. My step-mother took me to see it when I was but a tender lad of 10 in St Louis, MO.
This movie set in my mind a kind of will to find my own mother although at the time I had not a CLUE as to HOW, IF, or WHEN I would do this, I just had this intense confidence that I COULD and WOULD find her one day.
About all that I remember about this movie is the bombing of a European city and the loss of this little girls mother. I also remember the character Victor (I always thought he was played by David Nivens) as the little girls confidant and her pained frustration at not being able to understand why she could not find her mother and her resistance to the idea of her father's desire to marry this "outsider" and have her take the place of her missing mother. Of course the outsider was in fact her long lost mother from the war years.
Victor was the only trusted link that she had to her mother, as he knew her during the war.
Finally, at the end of her 8th Birthday party celebration, as the outsider was preparing to leave the family as a failed endeavor at persuading the little girl to accept her as her "NEW" mother, the little girl asks Victor (he was a portrait artist and also did caricatures at the Biirthday party) to draw a picture of her mother as he remembered her some 8 years earlier.
Of course Victor did a charcoal sketch of the "outsider" and presented it to the little girl folded in half. As she opened the large format drawing and looked at the image, she thought there was some sort of deception going on and she questioned him about his attempt to fool her.
I cannot for the life of me remember his actual response but is was in the form of a question of "what she wanted to believe", sorta like the young peasant girl in the film Dr. Zhivago, who did not want to believe something that was not true
The little girl reconciled with her Mother and all ended well that started out so horribly.
For the record, I did search for, and found, my birth mother in Belton, TX in 1970. Unfortunately the ending was not the same, quite the opposite. But until we try there will always be an ache in the heart to want to know. I saw and felt that ache in this movie.
DubleDeuce
This movie set in my mind a kind of will to find my own mother although at the time I had not a CLUE as to HOW, IF, or WHEN I would do this, I just had this intense confidence that I COULD and WOULD find her one day.
About all that I remember about this movie is the bombing of a European city and the loss of this little girls mother. I also remember the character Victor (I always thought he was played by David Nivens) as the little girls confidant and her pained frustration at not being able to understand why she could not find her mother and her resistance to the idea of her father's desire to marry this "outsider" and have her take the place of her missing mother. Of course the outsider was in fact her long lost mother from the war years.
Victor was the only trusted link that she had to her mother, as he knew her during the war.
Finally, at the end of her 8th Birthday party celebration, as the outsider was preparing to leave the family as a failed endeavor at persuading the little girl to accept her as her "NEW" mother, the little girl asks Victor (he was a portrait artist and also did caricatures at the Biirthday party) to draw a picture of her mother as he remembered her some 8 years earlier.
Of course Victor did a charcoal sketch of the "outsider" and presented it to the little girl folded in half. As she opened the large format drawing and looked at the image, she thought there was some sort of deception going on and she questioned him about his attempt to fool her.
I cannot for the life of me remember his actual response but is was in the form of a question of "what she wanted to believe", sorta like the young peasant girl in the film Dr. Zhivago, who did not want to believe something that was not true
The little girl reconciled with her Mother and all ended well that started out so horribly.
For the record, I did search for, and found, my birth mother in Belton, TX in 1970. Unfortunately the ending was not the same, quite the opposite. But until we try there will always be an ache in the heart to want to know. I saw and felt that ache in this movie.
DubleDeuce