This seems like a movie made during the Golden era of hollywood, made between 1933 and 1958, and in fact, there is a reference to Clark Gable in a conversation about love and marriage. It starts off in Poland as the Nazis are taking power, and switches to Canada in 1962 where the couple from the first part of the film end up, now unhappily married, their marital issues affecting the children from their marriage and from a good friend who lives nearby. I was not familiar with any of the leading actors in The cast, and in fact, it was the presence of Burt Lancaster that attracted me to this film in the first place. One of his last movies, he has a cameo as the wise old man, perhaps a throwback to the character that John Barrymore is offered in a play in the movie "Dinner at Eight", the character who disappears early in the play and never appears again until the finale.
The film is presented in a very dramatic way with music swelling throughout, dealing with a female musician in Poland, ending up in Canada with her doctor husband after the Nazis take over, and their daughter ends up a ballerina, in love with the son of their best friend, but troubled in the relationship because of what she sees as problems in her parents marriage. It's obvious that he is having an affair, but that is never detailed, and in fact, there seems to be a lot edited out from the play by the author, best known to the world as Pope John Paul II.
Certainly, this is a gorgeous film to look at, and while very cliched in the sense of how old movies portrayed marital problems and dealt with multi-generational stories, it is never boring. The performances are basically adequate, and the issues that happen in the missing 20 years make you wonder what really lead to the unhappiness of this couple, so obviously in love in the early 1940's, yet barely tolerating each other as the years go by. I find it interesting that a man who devoted his life to God and the church would write something about a sacrament that he didn't experience himself. Perhaps his love of the movies that he saw as a young adult gave him the same that he wrote, but this certainly would not be a classic love story in 1988. It's something that could have been on the screen in 1945 with Merle Oberon and Paul Henried, with Claude Rains in the Burt Lancaster role and a young Ann Blyth playing the daughter. Definitely something worthy for TCM or the old fashioned late show than the hip late 1980's.
The film is presented in a very dramatic way with music swelling throughout, dealing with a female musician in Poland, ending up in Canada with her doctor husband after the Nazis take over, and their daughter ends up a ballerina, in love with the son of their best friend, but troubled in the relationship because of what she sees as problems in her parents marriage. It's obvious that he is having an affair, but that is never detailed, and in fact, there seems to be a lot edited out from the play by the author, best known to the world as Pope John Paul II.
Certainly, this is a gorgeous film to look at, and while very cliched in the sense of how old movies portrayed marital problems and dealt with multi-generational stories, it is never boring. The performances are basically adequate, and the issues that happen in the missing 20 years make you wonder what really lead to the unhappiness of this couple, so obviously in love in the early 1940's, yet barely tolerating each other as the years go by. I find it interesting that a man who devoted his life to God and the church would write something about a sacrament that he didn't experience himself. Perhaps his love of the movies that he saw as a young adult gave him the same that he wrote, but this certainly would not be a classic love story in 1988. It's something that could have been on the screen in 1945 with Merle Oberon and Paul Henried, with Claude Rains in the Burt Lancaster role and a young Ann Blyth playing the daughter. Definitely something worthy for TCM or the old fashioned late show than the hip late 1980's.