Remember the Day (1941)

User Rating:

7.3/10   

Director:

Henry King

Writers:

Phillip Dunning (play) and
Philo Higley (play) ...

Release Date:

25 December 1941 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Romance | War

Plot:

Elderly schoolteacher Nora Trinell, waiting to meet presidential nominee Dewey Roberts, recalls him...

Plot Keywords:

Student | Teacher | Hotel | Candidate | School Teacher

Cast

Claudette Colbert	...	Nora Trinell
John Payne	...	Dan Hopkins
Shepperd Strudwick	...	Dewey Roberts (as John Sheppard)
Ann E. Todd	...	Kate Hill (as Ann Todd)
Douglas Croft	...	Dewey Roberts as a boy
Jane Seymour	...	Mrs. Roberts
Anne Revere	...	Miss Nadine Price
Frieda Inescort	...	Mrs. Dewey Roberts
Harry Hayden	...	Mr. Roberts
Francis Pierlot	...	Mr. Steele
Marie Blake	...	Miss Cartwright
William Henderson	...	Peter
Chick Chandler	...	Mr. Mason
Selmer Jackson	...	Graham
William Halligan	...	Tom Hanlon

Runtime:

86 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Mirrophonic Recording)

Certification:

USA:Passed (National Board of Review) | Finland:S | Sweden:Btl | USA:Approved (PCA #7713)

Company:

Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Soundtrack:

Till We Meet Again

A Forgotten, Bittersweet Love Story

This is a very nice little movie that showed Claudette Colbert and John Payne to great advantage as two young teachers who, in 1916, meet in a small mid-western town, teaching at a high school. They fall in love, and we watch the romance blossom into a marriage - the entire effect helped by the nostalgia of a by-gone, simpler era. Parallelling the story we have the story of a young boy that goes to the school and is taught by both Colbert and Payne.

The film is set up with it's heart (the romance) surrounded by a more recent story set in 1940, at the Republican Presidential Convention (a fictional version of the convention). Colbert is there to see the young boy student, who has now grown up. It is not until the film ends that we understand who she is visiting with. And it is not until the conclusion of the film that we get the bittersweet portion of the romance.

The film is very simple, and it's final element for success is that Payne and Colbert had terrific chemistry together. Ironically enough it would be their only film together (one wishes they had done a second film but that was not in the cards for some reason). Also ironically, it's total success should be compared with the comparative failure of TOMORROW IS FOREVER, wherein Orson Welles and Colbert both perform their roles well (in characters very like Payne's and Colbert's here) but lack the spark to make that trickier story more believable.