Forever and a Day

This is like a cavalcade travelling through history, commencing in Napoleonic times and ending in the Blitz. There are many poignant moments on the way, and the cast contains almost all the best names of the period. Among the most memorable ones are Charles Laughton as a drinking butler, Claude Rains as the only miserable tenant of the house ever, while the real moment of truth is in 1917 when the Americans enter the war. There is a very sensitive scene between Gladys Cooper and Merle Oberon that will stick on your mind for a long time, and Roland Young as the husband with Robert Coote as the blind veteran add to the impression of this scene. The second world war, which provides the beginning and end of the film, comes a little beside the point, since the main issue is the life that all the residents of the two families alternating in peopling the house, bestowed on the house and created a continuity, that not even the second world war could destroy. The message of the film is about continuity, how nothing can change what has been, which will go on forever even if only as memories, which provides quite some food for thought and afterthought. It's a very different film resembling almost none other, except in some ways Noel Coward's "Cavalcade" of 1931, which was something similar, ending in the first world war. This is in the same style and equally touching and profoundly human, which makes it a joy to behold and to remember.