Contains Spoiler!! "When you speak the name Orson Welles," Marlene Dietrich proclaimed, "You should kneel and make the sign of the cross!" Nowadays, few would disagree with paying such homage to Filmdom's only true genius; but in 1945 Welles' name was anathema in Hollywood, having run RKO into the red with his production of "The Magnificent Ambersons" and offending the Hearst empire's emperor, William Randolph Hearst, by his near slanderous portrayal of him as Charles Foster Kane in "Citizen Kane."
For the rest of his career Welles would be relegated to supporting roles, voiceover narrations, and finally hitting rock-bottom by touting cheap wine on television commercials, thundering "We shall sell no wine before it's time!" - doing anything, ANYTHING!, to raise enough funds in order to bequeath us such masterpieces as "Othello," "Macbeth," and "Chimes at Midnight."
"I subsidize myself," Welles said, receiving the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. "In other words, I'm crazy!"
1945's four-hanky weeper is a good example of just what rubbish Welles was willing to appear in to raise those funds. Welles portrays John MacDonald, who dashes off to WWI, leaving behind his wife, Elizabeth (a teary Claudette Colbert). John is declared MIA and Elizabeth announces to her employer, Lawrence Hamilton (the upstanding George Brent), that she is pregnant with John's child; however, this is 1945, so we can't say "pregnant." Naturally, Lawrence falls in love with Elizabeth, they marry, she has first John's child and then a child by Lawrence, but we don't see all that because the scene immediately shifts forward 20 years to find them all at the breakfast table.
Meanwhile, John is now living in Austria under the assumed name of Erik Kessler and for some unknown reason, speaking English with a preposterous meittel-Europa accent. He has also been horribly disfigured during the War, but in 1945, horrible disfigurement was suggested by rubbing black cork beneath Welles' eyelids. He's been wounded elsewhere (a la Jake Barnes in Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises," but again, this is 1945 and we can't touch THAT situation with a ten foot pole). He also has a child in tow, Margaret (6-year old Natalie Wood in her screen debut, hair dyed blonde), the daughter of John's doctor who was sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis.
John and Margaret seek passage to America and he finds work as a research scientist - guess where??? - in Lawrence Hamilton's company. Of course John and Elizabeth meet - the script says they have to - and it remains unclear who recognizes whom and when.
Meanwhile, back at the manse, with war clouds gathering, Elizabeth's son Drew (Richard Long, looking amazingly like the young Orson Welles and doing a pretty good impersonation of Welles' mellifluous baritone) wants to join up and do his bit. Elizabeth gets all teary and so do we. Indeed, Colbert spends so much screen time in tears that we wonder, was she a good enough actress to pull this off? Or did they spray her eyes with irritant before each scene?
Time to wrap it up. John dies suddenly, taking his secret that Drew is his son to the grave, and tossing into the lit fireplace a letter that would have explained it all to Drew. Unfortunately, Welles didn't have time to toss the script into the fireplace with it.
I give this stinker a BOMB rating - and indeed, if you see it, kneel and make the sign of the cross - and whisper a prayer for a film, and a brilliant career, in Purgatory.
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