There was a reason why Vinnie, one of the ladies who takes care of Kathleen’s hair, recommended The Enchanted Cottage, an RKO release from 1945, but it wasn’t that Kathleen and I were about to celebrate our thirty-first anniversary. I still don’t know what brought it up. But as we watched the video last night after dinner, the tears were streaming down my face, because the film’s message is only too true: when you are in love, you are in love with someone beautiful, and this beauty deepens and intensifies as your love grows over the years. The psychologists would probably chalk this phenomenon up to a projected vanity, but of course that’s not what it feels like. What it feels like is wonderful, to be married to be someone so beautiful.

I do not recommend The Enchanted Cottage, however, to anyone who has been married for fewer than thirty-one years. Despite its glints of brilliance, the movie is, overall, dated and unattractive. The exterior sets are barely better than what Ed Wood was capable of — really quite laughably fake-looking. The screenplay, based on a play by Pinero (now there’s a forgotten name), is preachy and cloying. There is a great deal of noble uplift and melodramatic weakness. The performance by Herbert Marshall, as a blind pianist who utters wisdom in his inimitable monotone, is almost camp. Mildred Natwick is pretty camp too, as the laconic widow who owns the cottage, but there’s a wink in her smile that suggests that she might be on loan from John Waters. Spring Byington and Richard Gaines are silly society people, and Hillary Brooke — well, Brooke is blondly gorgeous, but she’s no Claire Trevor, and you can see how she wound up playing third banana to Abbott and Costello. Alec Englander must have been related to the producer, to get the role of the ten year-old boy who guides Marshall’s character around; he looks something like Jerry Mathers but he also makes Jerry Mathers look like Olivier by comparison. The two stars, Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire, however, are very, very good; they do more than their best with the material that they’re given.

The idea is that McGuire is a plain Jane who falls in love with Young when he rents Natwick’s cottage for the honeymoon that he’ll be spending with Brooke. Young is a dashing airman who doesn’t expect to be commissioned anytime soon, but, what’s this? The calendar says “December 7, 1941.” The next thing you know, he’s the phantom of the opera, or nearly; some sort of trauma has caused the right side of his body to sag. His face is disfigured by an operatic scar, a dropping eye, and a pendulous lower lip. It’s really a pretty good job, and it changes him. He’s angry and doesn’t want to see anybody. (Another good job is the recreation of pre-war fashion.) Wounded by the look of disgust that Brooke gave him when he came back from the war (offscreen), he has returned to Natwick’s house to be alone. This naturally entails spending a lot of time with plain Jane.  Guess what: propinquity is nine-tenths of romance.

I forgot to mention that the cottage is enchanted, because that’s the title. The cottage, the opening backstory goes, was rented out for over a hundred years to happy young couples, “for as long as they liked” (presumably until children arrived), by a fine old English nobleman whose great house on the Maine coast had burned down, leaving only a sort of attached outbuilding. Imagine that, a ruin in America! A diamond-paned window has been inscribed with their autographs, as if it were a tree trunk. Young and McGuire get married, as a mutual convenience (turn up the nobility and the weakness), but that’s of course when the enchantment can begin, because now they’re husband and wife. Within a few days, they undergo a change: McGuire sees Young as he was before his crash, and Young sees McGuire as she appears in Gentleman’s Agreement. But other people see them as they really are, so Natwick and Marshall display the greatest tact in not looking at them. Byington and Gaines can’t manage it, and they almost ruin everything. The switches of point-of-view in the final scenes are expert and persuasive: you believe that what the lovers see is real.

I couldn’t stop registering the disparity in physiognomic drawbacks. The right side of Robert Young’s face is really pretty ghastly, something you want to turn away from. Dorothy McGuire, in contrast, is afflicted with nothing that a good hairdresser couldn’t fix. She has one of those Hollywood makeover roles, like Bette Davis’s in Now, Voyager. The moral of the story is that a woman’s love can embrace the genuinely ugly, but don’t expect a man to pursue a woman who can’t be bothered (or lacks the wherewithal) to look sharp.

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Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2012 at 11:47 am.