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THE ENCHANTED COTTAGE
Rating:  ½
USA. 1945.
Director – John Cromwell, Screenplay – DeWitt Bodeen & Herman J. Mankiewicz, Based on the Play by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, Producer – Harriet Parsons, Photography (b&w) – Ted Tetzlaff, Music – Roy Webb, Music Supervisor – C. Bakaleinikoff, Special Effects – Vernon L. Walker, Art Direction – Carroll Clark & Albert S. D’Agostino. Production Company – RKO.
Cast:
Dorothy McGuire (Laura Pennington), Robert Young (Oliver Bradford), Herbert Marshall (John Hillgrove), Mildred Natwick (Abigail Minnett), Hillary Brooke (Beatrice Alexander), Spring Byington (Violet Price), Richard Gaines (Freddy Price)
Plot: Blind composer John Hillgrove premieres a symphony that he has composed in honour of Oliver Bradford and Laura Pennington. Afterwards, he tells their story. The homely but kind-hearted Laura obtained a housekeeping job at a Cornwall cottage that had been left by its owner to be used by married couples. There she befriended Air Force officer Oliver Bradford who came to the cottage, hiding from everybody his face, which had been badly scarred in combat, and sunken into self-loathing. When Oliver’s family tried to force him to see them, the only way for him to stay free was for he and Laura to marry. However, their marriage of convenience soon became one of love where they discovered that the accumulated love of the cottage allowed them to see one another without flaw.
The Enchanted Cottage is an old-fashioned weepie melodrama, It is the sort of film that could have only been produced in the 1940s. Everything is made to a ludicrously melodramatic extreme – the tone alternates between either wailing self-pity and ridiculous self-sacrifice to absurd little homilies on the saving power of true love. Yet somehow or another it all works in a schmaltzy way, although the end explanation about how the other person becomes perfected in the other’s eyes because they see ‘through the eyes of love’ is pure tosh. The transformation scenes are well handled – the careful balance between whether the transformation is real or not is no surprise when one sees the name of DeWitt Bodeen, the author of Cat People (1942) and a number of Val Lewton’s psychological horror films listed on the credits.
Dorothy McGuire’s self-sacrificing performance is hard-going, but Robert Young plays with a self-pitying harshness that is not too bad. The best performance comes from Mildred Natwick who blends both sternness and genteel in what would otherwise be a throwaway role.
The film is made on the cheap – the painted backdrop of the rest of the burnt house is painfully obvious. The film can never make up its mind where its location is meant to be – it gives the appearances of being on the English coast, but the coastline is never seen in anything other than painted backdrop, while accents waver wildly between American and English.
There was an earlier silent version of the story, The Enchanted Cottage (1924). Both films are based on a popular play by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero that first played in England in 1923, which wrote the story in terms of a serviceman from World War I.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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