love lost and forgotten
by
Douglas Messerli
Ben
Hecht, Samuel Hoffenstein, André De Toth (uncredited) (based
on the Duvivier film, Un Carnet de Bal)
Julien Duvivier (director) Lydia /
1941
As a surprise Fitzpatrick invites all of
her former lovers—most of whom have asked her to marry them—to dinner as well.
They include a rambunctious former football player, Bob Willard (George
Reeves); a blind pianist who has worked with her at the school and composed a
piano and orchestral piece in her honor, Frank Andry (Hans Jaray); and,
arriving late, the real love of her life, Richard Mason (Alan Marshal). Over
drinks the now reflective and quite witty Boston beauty recounts their loves
and why she has turned down their marital offers. What becomes clear in the
process is that, although she has loved Mason, Fitzpatrick might have been the
best man for her. But, as she herself perceives, in her youthful willfulness
she was not a coherent being.
Each of the men is still entranced by
Lydia’s grace and beauty, and evidently none of them have married either. When,
finally, out of curiosity Mason arrives, he does seem to even remember the
woman who loved him so deeply—a kind of ending that seems to come right out of
the stories of O. Henry!
In short, Lydia is long on talk and chronology, yet Duvivier’s sweeping
camera (something he shares with Max
Ophuls), the stunning sets at the McMillan mansion, the several dance halls
(Willard and Lydia remember a unreal version of reality with dozens of harps),
and the seaside cottage, along with the costumes and the wit of Ben Hecht’s and
Samuel Hoffenstein’s script (particularly as delivered by Lydia’s grandmother
(Oliver), make this an absolutely enchanting 140 minutes which is so much
better than most of today’s Hollywood films that one longs again to return to
the period of the studio star-system. Having just watched Oberon early on in
career in Wedding Rehearsal and never
having been able to forget her from Wuthering
Heights, I’ve now become a great Oberon fan, although I do wish she’d been
offered more remarkable roles; in this she most resembles the great Bette
Davis, even though her gown is not red, but only pink (again in
black-and-white). And I now feel that Joseph Cotton never played in a truly bad
movie—at least until the 1950s (he
performed in Citizen Kane the very
same year as Lydia, and followed this
film up with The Magnificent Ambersons and
Shadow of a Doubt in the very next
two years). Before he died, he sent my Sun & Moon Press the manuscript of
his autobiography in the late 1980s, which was published by another press as Vanity Will Get You Somewhere. I wish
I’d grabbed it up, but I seem to remember that the title turned me off, and I
surely felt that we couldn’t pay enough to obtain the rights.
Cotton and Oberon, along with Duvivier’s
fluid camera, should send everyone back to Lydia
for another or first look.
Los Angeles, May
10, 2017
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