Some movies stand up very well with time... Citizen Kane, Sunset Blvd., Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Metropolis... others fail miserably, like this movie. The characters are all Donna Reed too good to be true. The plot is incredibly predicable. The home spun homilies are insufferably sweet. The movie is a victim of its time. The RaRa for war drum beat is ever present. It was a hard time for our country and of course people did die and many were injured. But they were real people...not these card board cut outs. Movies which try to manipulate with so little talent for doing so are repulsive. I'll give Selznick credit though, he knew how to play his war time audience and he did it with the very limited talent he had. It might have helped if he had hired a real script writer instead of doing it himself. I was so bored by this 3 hour epic that I switched part of the time to the shopping channel for comic relief. My final criticism is the sound score. It's as drippy as the movie. I guess if they awarded "Scoring best matched to a pitiful movie," Max Steiner would have been a ringer for this one. It's fine to be patriotic. It's not fine to manipulate your audience with fake emotions, fake crying, stereo-typed casting (the malapropped black maid, the stoic colonel, the goody two shoes mother, the Lolly popped Shirley Temple, the Hedda Hopper type gossip columnist, the green as corn corporal, the German accented psychiatrist... the list goes on forever.) There was not a real person in this movie and the problem with that is some people see a movie like this, particularly in 1944 and think that this is the way people should act. Well they don't. It's a cartoon and a truly dreadful movie. I hope they have not been able to save the celluloid and it dissolves into a pile of saccharine sweetness.
Review of Since You Went Away
