War Stories - Part 3 - "Love Letters" - 1945

“Love Letters” (1945) is our third and last in the series of “war stories”. It’s a love story, and a mystery that doesn’t really need The War as a backdrop, but this was a time when so many letters were written, and relationships begun on the strength of a chance meeting.

In many families, the wife said goodbye to the husband (or sweetheart) at the train station. She said welcome home to him (if she was lucky), three or four years later.  The only way to communicate in the years between were by letters. They might meet again -- to resume their lives and their relationship -- as near strangers, unless the letters were particularly heartfelt, and the communication between them was open and honest.

I doubt in our age of instant, but often weak and meaningless, communication does the power of language ever come close to matching the importance it had during World War II.

Note: Ayn Rand co-wrote the script with the writer of the novel on this story is based, Christopher Massie.

Joseph Cotten, again here in his trademark role of the troubled, romantic loner, is an officer with the British Army in Italy. He pens the letters that his fellow officer, Roger Moreland, sends to his girlfriend. Roger, played by Robert Sully, is a boorish, self-centered cad, who, though unfaithful to this woman, is amused by the idea of winning her through Mr. Cotten’s tender prose.

Cotten is sick of the idea, and disgusted with himself for doing the chore, partly because he knows Roger is an ass, and partly because he fears he is falling in love with the woman who writes sensitive replies to his letters. He has a fiancée of his own, and he is growing apart from her. He seldom writes her, saving his deepest thoughts for Roger’s friend, Victoria.

“I was able to write to her all the things I was never able to say to any woman I know.” He says, and felt the ruse was innocent as long as the girl didn’t care. “But Victoria cared, understood.” He realizes Victoria has fallen in love, not with Roger as she believes, but with his letters.

“She’s in love with a man who doesn’t exist.”

Mr. Cotten demands the charade stop. He won’t write anymore, wants to know nothing more about her. When Cotten is seriously wounded and placed in a military hospital in Italy, he gets a letter from Roger, who has returned to England for training. Roger has married Victoria.

When Cotten is sent back to England to convalesce he learns from another pal that Roger is dead, not in the war but from an accident at home. This news nags at Mr. Cotten, because it means this Victoria is now a widow, and free, and a temptation in spite of himself. He also feels guilt for making possible what he suspects must have been a bad marriage.  In a way, though it is never couched in these terms, it's as if he prostituted this earnest, romantic woman to a callous stranger.

He still wants no part of the charade he committed, and wants to distance himself from what he has done.  But when his brother takes him to a party at a friend’s flat, Cotten meets Victoria even though he is not aware of it, mainly because she is not aware she is Victoria.

Victoria is played by Jennifer Jones in their second pairing after last year’s “Since You Went Away.” She goes by another name, because she has lost her memory. There is more intrigue to come, and we get bits and pieces a little at a time. I won’t give a play-by-play on the plot, that would ruin it, but we do learn that Roger was murdered, and Mr. Cotten discovers his letters played a part in a tragedy and the great mystery of Miss Jones’ amnesia.

Jennifer Jones is by turns ethereal, and also teasing and free spirited. This is also something of a trademark role for her, the fey innocent, but she appears more at ease in this film and less fragile than in some of her other work.

Ann Richards plays her friend, a woman who took Jones into her flat and cared for her when she was unable to take care of herself. Ann Richards also had minor roles in “Random Harvest” (see this post) and in “Sorry Wrong Number” (see this post here and here), but her film career ended in the early 1950s.

It’s difficult to believe she could not have been given better promotion by a studio in Hollywood and enjoyed a longer film career, as she has an engaging presence in this film. Her role is minor, but she shows a range of emotion and great chemistry with Joseph Cotten. Until Cotten falls in love with Jennifer Jones, one might suspect, and even wish, that she would get together with Cotten.

Notice the scene where, when Ann Richards wants to discuss the tragedy/mystery privately with Cotten, she sends Jennifer Jones to the store to get some porridge. She hands her their ration book. Since the UK imported most of their cereals (and a lot of other products), rationing was more severe there and lasted well beyond the war. Though the US had its own rationing program, I don’t think we rationed oatmeal (porridge). Maybe somebody can set me straight on that. Being the so-called “bread basket of the world” had its compensations.

We don’t see too many ration books of the day in the movies, and I’m not sure why. Possibly the government requested the cooperation of the film industry not to make too big a joke of them so that people would follow the rules and take their use seriously. Possibly they did not want to harp on (though an English setting in this movie, this was still an American-made movie for an American audience), shortages to an audience weary of them and doing its utmost to sacrifice.

Mr. Cotten takes up residence in a country cottage left to him by his deceased aunt, where he is looked after by rustic family retainer Cecil Kellaway (whom we saw in “Portrait of Jennie”, see here). Ian Wolfe plays a vicar, and Harry Allen a local farmer, both character actors who you might remember from “Mrs. Miniver”, which we reviewed in the second post on this series.

Gladys Cooper, who also teamed up with Jennifer Jones in “Song of Bernadette” (1943), see this previous post, plays Miss Jones’ guardian. She plays prominently in the tragedy/mystery, and she’s a shadowy figure for most of the film. It’s not until the very end we get her story and the truth about Victoria. It’s a good scene between Jones and Cooper, where they both reach back into their memories and describe a particular pivotal event, each finishing the other’s sentences.

The war in this movie, unlike in “Mrs. Miniver” and “The More the Merrier” is less on the surface of everyday life for these country dwellers and more in the fog-shrouded background, though there is one scene where Cotten, driving with Jones on winding lanes, does mention the gas rationing, “Since you love motoring so much, we’ll travel to the end of our coupons.”

Also, there is a scene with a wedding in what appear to be the bombed-out ruins of a church, evocative of the end of “Mrs. Miniver.” The war is still present in this movie, but it seems to be sliding into the background.

And I think that portrait of the little boy which figures in a couple of scenes that Joseph Cotten says is him as a child really was him. There is a similar photo in his autobiography, “Vanity Will Get You Somewhere” (Mercury House, Inc., San Francisco, 1987). In that book, he states that the photo was also used in “Shadow of a Doubt”.

The war is mostly represented in the letters he has written to her, and in his depression on coming home. He tells her, “Ever since I came back from the war, I’ve wanted to be alone. I’ve been miserable with other people. You’re the first one with whom I feel at peace.”

She replies, “That’s because you’re broken up inside almost the same as I am. You’ve been through the war and you can’t bear to look back.”

In this movie, and as World War II drifted into the past (the film was released in August 1945, after the Japanese surrender but before the formal surrender ceremonies in September), the generation that fought the war seemed to decide in large measure not to talk about it anymore. Many servicemen, like Joseph Cotten in the film, preferred not to look back.

Much of that war is documented in letters, and the intriguing notion that two people can fall in love without ever meeting each other…I would not hazard a guess as to how many times that actually happened. I don’t doubt that it did.

This is the end of our series on “war stories”. The all-clear has been sounded. Now get out of my cellar.  I'd better not be missing any cans of SPAM.

The Roaring Twenties - 1939

“The Roaring Twenties” (1939) may have even more resonance today than it did when it was produced. The year it premiered was only ten years after the 1929 Stock Market Crash, and the world had entered a new era in 1939 with a vengeance. This end of the Depression look back at how-we-got-to-where-we-are is certainly nostalgic, but it was also a critical success and should be regarded as one of the champion movies in that champion movie year of 1939.

“The Roaring Twenties”, fast-paced and well directed by Raoul Walsh, is remarkable for all the things it attempts to be and succeeds. It is a docu-drama as much as a melodrama. It is a gangster film, but there are so many musical numbers you could as easily call it a musical. It has some outrageously funny lines, but it contains scenes so heartbreakingly pathetic.

Most especially, it looks back on an era still so recent in 1939 and yet from such a remarkably distant perspective, the way we might pack for college and discover with condescending amusement some old souvenir from grammar school. It is a mere ten years from eight years old to adulthood. It also feels like a lifetime.

The film begins with a rolling title prologue that speaks to us today in our present economic crisis: “It may come to pass that, at some distant date, we will be confronted with another period similar to the one depicted in this photoplay. If that happens, I pray that events as dramatized here, will be remembered.” It is signed Mark Hellinger, the writer of the script, who took the stories of real people and real incidents as a basis for the film.

Then the stern voice of John Deering, the narrator, takes over and through a montage of images, the clock is turned back, year by year, to 1918, the last year of the Great War.

“What’s past is prologue” Shakespeare wrote in “The Tempest”, and as such it is appropriate to begin a story that concludes with the Crash at a point in time when the seeds for that event were sewn. Perhaps too often we look at a moment in time as if it really stands apart from other moments, but it does not. It cannot.


James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Jeffrey Lynn are doughboys in France. Cagney is the rough and ready average Joe. Jeffrey Lynn is the sensitive college boy who struggles with right and wrong. Bogart is the thug. It would be one of Humphrey Bogart’s last thug roles before he moved on to being the reluctant hero in 1940s films. He’s looking hale and hearty here, fit and much younger than he did even four years later in “Casablanca.”

In one scene, his thuggishness borders on the psychotic, when Jeffrey Lynn hesitates to shoot a German soldier because he looks only about 15 years old. Bogart plugs him with relish. He loves his gun.

The war ends, and Cagney straggles back home to New York to try to get his old mechanic’s job back, but his job has been given to someone else in the meantime, and he can’t find another one in the post-war recession. This is rather like a foreshadowing of Dana Andrews’ inability to fit in and find a place for himself after World War II in “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946). (It was in reaction to such conditions that the government mandated during World War II that returning veterans be guaranteed a job with their former employers.)

One very brief, but funny scene if you catch it, is when Cagney gives his old pal, Frank McHugh, a souvenir from the war. It is a German helmet, and McHugh hides it from would-be thieves by shoving it under his bed. Cagney wordlessly motions McHugh to turn the helmet over, because the way he placed it under his bed looks like a chamber pot.



The narrator comes back with more March of Time stuff about bobbed hair, shorter skirts, and the power that drives the rest of the film, Prohibition. Cagney, working as a cab driver, innocently delivers some bootleg liquor to Gladys George, who plays a gal-who’s-seen-it-all and runs a speakeasy. Cagney gets nabbed, takes the fall for Miss George, who later gets him out of jail and becomes his partner in the bootlegging business.

James Cagney spends the rest of the decade getting richer and richer, and more deeply involved in bootlegging, corruption, and gangland murders. Eventually, Priscilla Lane shows up to expose Cagney’s softer side. She had written him pen-pal letters during the war, but when he returned, he dismissed her as a schoolgirl when he had mistakenly thought she was much older. Reunited when she is a struggling dancer in the chorus, Cagney promotes her career in Gladys George’s speakeasy as a singer.

Priscilla Lane actually shares top billing with James Cagney in this movie, and would continue to have a successful year with “Four Daughters” where she was reunited in the first of several more films with Jeffrey Lynn. Here, likewise, Lane and Lynn fall for each other. Cagney falls for Lane. Gladys George falls for Cagney. It is an inextricable web of unrequited love.



Jeffrey Lynn, now a lawyer, helps Cagney with the legal aspects of his business empire and rather hypocritically tries to overlook the illegal. Eventually, Humphrey Bogart joins the business, and the intense scenes between Bogart and Cagney trying to assert their power over each other are something terrific.



If you have ever seen the Carol Burnett parody of this film with Carol as Gladys George, Steve Lawrence as Cagney, Harvey Korman as Jeffrey Lynn, and Sally Struthers as Priscilla Lane, then perhaps, like me, you are reminded of it all through watching this movie. Thanks a whole lot, Carol.

Gladys George, who played the world weary dame with the heart of gold better than anyone (and speaking of “The Best Years of Our Lives” pulled off the same magic there in a minor role), has some great lines and delivers them with deadpan humor. She is most effective silently pining after James Cagney. In the scene where Cagney brings Priscilla Lane to audition for Miss George, he fidgets with the excitement of a schoolboy crush, and he absently grips Gladys George’s hand as he listens to Priscilla Lane sing.

Gladys George seems to feel an electric current at Cagney’s touch, and sadly watches his enchantment for another, much younger, much prettier woman. Another actress might have shown a cliché tinge of jealously or resentment in her reaction, but Gladys George plays it inwardly, almost with shyness.


“What a load of ice!” she blurts when he shows her the diamond rings he has bought for Priscilla Lane. We know her heart is breaking, and we know that Cagney’s will, too, when he discovers Priscilla does not love him, despite the fact that he also bought her a new fangled crystal set radio which she and Cagney listen to on headphones.

Speaking of 1920s paraphernalia, look at the scenes of Cagney and others handling money. The paper bills are much larger and wider than we have today. The government changed to the size bills we use today in July 1929, ostensibly to save paper. As a result, wallet manufacturers had to come up with new, slimmer, models.

We see the crystal sets, the bathtub gin, the rum runners, the Tommy guns, the gangsters, the cops on the make, but the film manages to give us a tour of the Roaring Twenties with only a little feeling of parody. Most of it is a survey class in what can happen when lives are lived to excess, without a thought of tomorrow.

On this 80th anniversary of the Crash of 1929, we may look for parallels between this time and our own. There are inevitably some parallels, but nothing so neat and clear. Time isn’t a blueprint for us to follow. We still have to make up much of it as we go along.

Perhaps at this anniversary, we may watch this movie with something more than just nostalgia. Perhaps we might even be moved to empathy as we understand a bit more about excess and failure with the economy of the last few years.

There are no films of “the Crash”. Newsreel cameras cranked out footage of panicked crowds at Wall Street this day 80 years ago, but that was rather like today when the news media shifts (and wastes) its enormous resources not to cover an event but to cover the public opinion poll about the event. Perhaps filming panicked crowds is more exciting than filming numbers on a chalk board being erased and written over.

This movie covers the Crash by framing it in the context of this whole era, from the end of World War I, through the Noble Experiment, from Main Street to Wall Street, and the resulting Great Depression. In the study of any historic event, it is the months and years preceding the event that really tell us all about the event. We might say our current economic challenges have their roots as far back as the 1980s. We do know, in hindsight, that the 1929 Crash devastated a generation, and forever colored the world of that generation’s children, the ones who would spend their childhoods during the Great Depression, would grow up to fight World War II.

For a long time after this movie, after that generation grew up, the perspective of this 1929 nightmare was growing dim and made somehow quaint by nostalgia crazes. Eighty years on, we might be in perfect position, the first audience for this film in generations, to really identify with the suckers and the straight arrows, the crooks and the gangsters, and the average Joes, and maybe even the omniscient narrator, the whole menagerie that make up “The Roaring Twenties.”

When this film was released in 1939, though it was a success, the world was moving at breakneck speed into another, even more sinister era. It was as if this film was a last look back at the life they knew before they became engulfed in the complete unknown.


James Cagney loses his shirt in the Crash, and loses much of his business to Bogart. Cagney is on the skids, but he has Gladys George to keep him company, now singing herself (“A Shanty in Old Shantytown” no less) in a cheap saloon. Prohibition is over.

“The days of the rackets are over,” Jeffrey Lynn tells Cagney, but he answers with more truthfulness than even the writer of the script probably knew,

“Don’t kid yourself about that.”

Cagney has one last, very violent, power play with Bogart, and in the memorable final scene on the snow-covered church steps, only Gladys George is left to comfort a dying Cagney. When a cop asks who the bum on the steps is, she replies, “He used to be a big shot.”

It might be a pronouncement upon that whole careless era, or on any Ponzi schemer, unscrupulous investment manager, or average chump who lost a good chunk of his retirement in ours.