The big draw for me in watching "To Each His Own" is the fact that it brought Olivia de Havilland the first of her two career Oscars for Best Actress. Not only that, but she beat one of my all-time favorite performances by an actress to do so, that of Celia Johnson's in "Brief Encounter." Well, much as I love de Havilland, I think the Academy got it wrong that year.
"To Each His Own" is pretty standard-issue women's picture stuff of the time, albeit it's pretty racy in its treatment of unwed pregnancy. Olivia suffers as nobly as anybody for her child, which she pretends is an orphan dropped off at a neighbor's doorstep so as to avoid a town scandal and then watches be adopted by another couple who raise the child as their own. De Havilland watches from afar as her child grows into a soldier, snatching fleeting moments with him over the years in the guise of a doting aunt while she becomes a successful businesswoman. De Havilland's character is so confident throughout the entire film that we never really feel like she's in any danger of becoming overcome by her hardships, which is good for her but bad for any dramatic tension the film is trying to build. It's a decent movie but a rather forgettable one, and Olivia was better in all sorts of other things, mostly because she had much better characters to play.
Charles Brackett, frequent collaborator of Billy Wilder, was Oscar nominated for writing the film's original story.
Grade: B
"To Each His Own" is pretty standard-issue women's picture stuff of the time, albeit it's pretty racy in its treatment of unwed pregnancy. Olivia suffers as nobly as anybody for her child, which she pretends is an orphan dropped off at a neighbor's doorstep so as to avoid a town scandal and then watches be adopted by another couple who raise the child as their own. De Havilland watches from afar as her child grows into a soldier, snatching fleeting moments with him over the years in the guise of a doting aunt while she becomes a successful businesswoman. De Havilland's character is so confident throughout the entire film that we never really feel like she's in any danger of becoming overcome by her hardships, which is good for her but bad for any dramatic tension the film is trying to build. It's a decent movie but a rather forgettable one, and Olivia was better in all sorts of other things, mostly because she had much better characters to play.
Charles Brackett, frequent collaborator of Billy Wilder, was Oscar nominated for writing the film's original story.
Grade: B