How have we nearly sped through February? We’re back with the next installment in our Top Ten Tearjerkers series, this time with a particularly poignant pick: 1942’s Random Harvest. “Ronald Colman and Greer Garson had two of the most beautiful speaking voices in the movies. I have a great fondness for both of them. I suppose Greer Garson is something of an acquired taste. She has a marvelous, expansive womanliness that is redolent of the great actresses of the early Twentieth Century. I’ve always imagined her playing Shaw’s “Candida.” This movie is based on a novel by James Hilton and the plot just keeps going. It’s a wonderful story. Colman is a British aristocrat who suffers from amnesia after being wounded in WWI. He escapes from an insane asylum and begins a new life with a lovely music hall performer played by Greer Garson. On his first trip away from her, he’s hit by a taxi and suddenly has total recall of his previous life… but no longer remembers Greer! I don’t want to give …

If any one film can be credited as the most prominent influence on Charles’ current production of The Confession of Lily Dare, it’s The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931). Lily’s character arc; each besotted glance, throaty growl, and afflicted crumple of the body follows in Helen Hayes’ steps. “Okay. This is not one of my faaaaavorite movies, but I enjoy it a lot. I list it here because it’s one of the films that most inspired my new play The Confession of Lily Dare. It’s mainly notable for a lovely and insightful performance by Helen Hayes in the title role. Most people are only familiar with Helen Hayes from her performances on television and film in her old age such as Airport. Madelon Claudet was essentially her film debut. She won her first Oscar for this performance and had a brief successful film career as a leading lady before returning to her first love, the theatre, and being dubbed the “First Lady of the American Stage.” The plot is something of a riff on Madame …

The untold want by life and land ne’er granted, Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find. Walt Whitman, “The Untold Want” The 1942 film Now, Voyager is regarded as one of the most beloved love stories in American film history. Directed by Irving Rapper and starring Bette Davis and Paul Henreid (with an Oscar-winning score by Max Steiner), it was selected for preservation in our National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2007. “Bette Davis was the Queen of the Warner Brothers lot in the late thirties and forties and in her golden period she starred in a number of my favorite “women’s films.” My favorite is Now Voyager. So much happens to her in barely two hours. She plays Charlotte Vale, the neurotic spinster daughter of a Boston matriarch (wonderfully played by the always brilliant Gladys Cooper). She recovers at a sanitarium from a nervous breakdown and undergoes a fabulous transformation into the epitome of forties chic and becomes the most popular woman on a cruise to South America. In …

Come 1940 we meet a very different Robert Taylor post-Camille, this time co-starring with Vivien Leigh in the remake of the 1931 film of the same name.* “Vivien Leigh! I love Vivien Leigh. I might even say [she’s] my favorite actress. This was her follow up film to Gone With The Wind. It was based on a stage play by Robert E. Sherwood and had already been filmed once in 1931 with Mae Clarke. This new MGM version is more glossy and romantic than the original, but I feel adds greater dimension to the central role of Myra, a young ballet dancer, who falls in love with Roy, a British officer (Robert Taylor) in WWI London. Let’s face it. Mae Clarke was fine but I wouldn’t want to see her play Blanche DuBois. Roy’s mistakenly listed as killed in action. Myra’s dismissed from the ballet company by a terrifying Maria Ouspenskaya. She is one of the most eccentric actresses ever to grace the screen. Anyway, hunger, poverty and despair lead Myra to turn to prostitution. …

First in our series: Camille (1936) with the inimitable Greta Garbo. “If you have never seen a Greta Garbo film, and want to know what all the hubbub is about, check out this sumptuous adaptation of the classic Dumas tale about a tragic 19th century courtesan and her self-sacrifice. Directed impeccably by George Cukor, it’s 1930’s MGM at it’s most opulent and fatalistically sentimental or sentimentally fatalistic. Garbo, who can at times be frustratingly sonombulistic and mannered is in this film energized and remarkably contemporary. She has a lightness and wit and imbues a sense of irony in every scene. Everything that Garbo is noted for, her androgynous nature, her erotic dominance over her male co-star (in this case, an impossibly beautiful young Robert Taylor), her enigmatic glamour is all expressed here. I’ll go as far as to say that it’s one of the greatest film performances in classic Hollywood cinema. Garbo was nominated for a Oscar for her role as Marguerite Gautier and really should have won. The film succeeds on so many levels …