A Film Canon

 

 

The first great film of memory loss, and one of the most contemplative of anti-war statements, Random Harvest takes Lost Horizon and Goodbye Mr Chips' desire to escape time to its nightmarish conclusion, in the form of 'Smithy' (Ronald Colman), a veteran unable to recall anything prior to the battle that placed him in a foggy, overgrown asylum. Through his eyes, the armistice celebrations take on an lurid, jarring and ultimately ominous quality, inducing him to translate temporal escapism into spatial terms, as he and vaudevillian Paula (Greer Garson) retreat to an impossibly remote corner of the English countryside, far beyond the catastrophic purview of crowds, darkness and bombs. Yet it is with a second memory reconfiguration, which restories his pre-war life, but erases the intervening three years, that the allegorical dimension becomes most powerful, construing the entire inter-war period as one of disorientation, fragmentation and deja vu - as if the world had gone to sleep, and woken up gradually with a vague familiarity at the front of its mind. Similarly, the contrast between Smithy's life with Paula, as a father and family man, and his renewed life as Charles Rainier, in which he is briefly engaged to his niece, casts the returned veteran as a man without a generation; or, rather, as equally estranged from and attracted to both adult and childhood universes. In this way, the most accurate representation of Smithy's/Rainier's relation to the world is not his final - and pointedly elided - consolidation of memory, nor his concomitant understanding of why he suggested a marriage of convenience with his secretary - Paula, until now unrecognised - but their marriage itself; a poignant study in the state of being together alone, or, as they put it, an effort to "pool the loneliness", that comes from being "ghost-ridden...prisoners of our past".