A Film Canon

This artful fusion of war and maternal melodramas turns on a sexual encounter between Jody Norris (Olivia de Havilland), a small-town American girl, and Bart Cosgrove (John Lund), a young (WWI) pilot briefly visiting her town. Not only does Jody fall pregnant, but Bart dies in action soon after, forcing her to give up the child to married friends, in place of whom she builds up a cosmetic empire in anticipation of their reconciliation. In this way, screenwriters Charles Brackett and Jacques Therry manage to translate issues about women's sexual and professional liberation into a subtly militaristic register, most strikingly in their refusal to pass judgment on particular forms of pre-marital sex; or, more accurately, in the implication that sex may be a form of expression commensurate to love, the central act consistently presented as a gesture of pragmatic compassion. Even the sole religious voice - Jody's nurse - is conspicuously token, her judgment quickly subsumed into a more accepting, charismatic presence, while the cathedral that opens the narrative is never offered as anything other than a Blitz look-out point. This London framing structure is the other high point of the film, undermining the fairly predictable reunion between Jody and her son with the unusual rapport between her and co-lookout Lord Desham (Roland Culver), which centres on their recognition of each other as "the sort of forlorn people that do extra duty on holidays", and produces a sombre, melancholy counterpoint to the melodrama proper - or, rather, a relation that doesn't quite fit with it, as evinced in the gap between Desham's request that Jody recount her history, and her later recollection of it; that is, a refusal to frame her story with a legitimating masculine perspective or presence.