This is in many ways Michael Balcon's first serious assault on the US market, in concert with his producing/directing partner, Victor Saville, and the offices of the ambitious Tiffany-Stahl Studios in Los Angeles; at this stage, the most likely of the Poverty Row studios to break into the Majors, until the following three years destroyed the studio and sent most of the majors into some form of receivership.
George Barraud is an English officer during the Great War, in love with French entertainer Betty Compson. They are to be married, but he is ordered back to the Front... and suffers shell shock to such an extent that he can't remember anything about his war years. After the War, he marries Juliette Compton in a distant sort of marriage. One evening, he is at the theater and sees Miss Compson performing. He remembers all and discovers they have a son.
It's the complicated sort of womanly suffering that worked all right in RANDOM HARVEST, solely because that movie starred Ronald Colman and Greer Garson. If this movie almost works, it's because Betty Compson gives a magnificent performance; but despite some great camerawork by Benjamin Kline (including shots that Balcon would have Hitchcock use in the concluding sequence of THE 39 STEPS), the over-the-top plot and other performances make this one only intermittently watchable.
Still, when it's Miss Compson alone on the screen, it's mesmerizing.
