Random Harvest: 7.9/10
Random Harvest (1942): 7.9/10
Random Harvest, Greer Garsons' follow up film to Mrs. Miniver is an unreasonably satisfying film that somehow manages to have not only aged well but to strike the difficult task of balancing over the top melodrama with complete sincerity.
Random Harvest tells a completely ludicrous story; a WWI soldier who renames himself John Smith loses his memory during the war and marries a chorus girl named Paula and they have a child. While away to a job interview in Liverpool, Smith is hit by a car which then restores his memory to him. He is Charles Napier, son of a very rich father who has just died. He cannot remember the last 3 years of his life but resumes his old life with relative ease. I will not reveal how Paula finds her way back into the story.
This all sounds absurd and of course it is. However the film somehow manages to work despite being about 10-15 minutes too long towards the end. The main reason that the film works is because of the two performances by Greer Garson and Ronald Colman. Greer Garson pulls us in as we sympathize with her and admire her strength. It is impossible not to love her. She needs a spot on my Top 30 Classic Actresses because she really deserves it. As for Ronald Colman, he is pretty remarkable here and gives one of film's greatest performances here. This is the role that the film depends on. If his performance felt insincere then the entire film would fail. It his hard to take this material seriously but these two actors allow us to do that. He has to pull of a very difficult task. He needs to be someone who cannot remember who he is and who has nothing going for him, then he has to be someone who has no idea who he is and does have something going for him and then he has to play his original self once he gains his memory back. He pulls it all off beautifully.
With LeRoy's romantic but not flighty, and visually grounded yet fleeting visuals, Colman's and Garson's performances and the successful treatment of potentially disasterous material, Random Harvest is a joy to watch, more satisfying than most romances I have seen. While I still think it is a bit long, Random Harvest is an extremely successful, well aged melodrama.
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I am sucker for quality melodrama and though Mrs Miniver is obviously superior this one does entertain too....Greer Garson (That Forsyte Woman being a fave) was so hit and miss for me though, I like her theatrics but later on in her career they didn't fit.