![]() (For reasons I didn’t understand – or may have already forgotten – the siblings had presumed their missing-in-action brother long dead but their father, it seems, took a different view.) Charles is keen to complete his university degree but, since his brother is a hopeless businessman, agrees to devote himself instead to the family firm and attempt to revive its fortunes. Charles’s siblings are rather put out by his return at what is, from his point of view, a financially opportune time: their father’s will is about to be read. Charles travels from Liverpool to the Rainier family home, Random Hall, there to learn that his father’s funeral has just taken place. When he comes round, he remembers who he was before his blackout in the trenches – his name is Charles Rainier, he’s the son of a wealthy businessman – but all memories of his life in the asylum, and with Paula and their infant son, have been wiped from his mind. On a Liverpool street, he’s knocked down by a taxi and bumps his head in the fall. Smithy takes to writing he gets a few things published and is invited to an interview in Liverpool for a job on a newspaper there. Anxious to protect ‘Smithy’, as she calls him, and to try to nurse him back to health, Paula abandons her performing career and takes him to stay in a quiet Devon village, where they soon marry and have a child. ![]() She immediately realises Colman is from the asylum she almost immediately falls in love with him. In a pub there, he meets Paula Ridgeway (Garson), a member of a theatrical troupe performing in the town. It’s in this home-sweet-home that the Colman character has enjoyed a brief perfect marriage with the film’s heroine, played by Greer Garson it’s here too that, after years of separation of an extraordinary kind, they are properly reunited.Ĭolman, known in the asylum as John Smith, wanders out of the place on the evening of Armistice Day in November 1918 and into the nearby industrial town of Melbridge (somewhere in the Midlands). Random Harvest ends in an idyllic Devon cottage, no less pretty for being a studio construction with a painted backdrop. Our first sight is of the dark approach to an asylum that houses variously traumatised Great War veterans: the inmates include Ronald Colman, as a British officer who was gassed and shellshocked so badly that he can’t remember his name or identity. ![]() I recalled little of the plot but the key locations were, for someone with next to no visual memory, surprisingly familiar – maybe it helps that shots of these locations begin and end the film. ![]() It was funny discovering what I remembered and had forgotten about this well-known amnesia-based movie (based on a 1941 novel by James Hilton). I think I saw Random Harvest in my teens and had never seen it again until now. ![]()
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