I'll Be Seeing You (1944)
No one’s heard of I’ll Be Seeing You, but it’s an excellent postwar drama that was actually made during WWII. Joseph Cotten stars as a soldier with PTSD who just got released from a veteran’s hospital. He has a week to enjoy Christmas before getting shipped back to the front. Ginger Rogers also only has a week, but for a different reason: she’s a prison inmate who gets released to her uncle’s family for Christmas. When they meet, each one keeps secrets, but they can’t hide their mutual attraction and the sense of hope inspired by meeting someone who doesn’t know their problems.
It’s a different sort of role for both leads, showing an impressive range in their acting. Joe probably hated Dana Andrews, who was immortalized two years later for playing shell-shocked veteran Fred Derry in The Best Years of Our Lives. Ginger plays a guarded woman unused to kindness very well. Shirley Temple, unfortunately, was put in bratty teen roles in the early 1940s, rather than taking the Deanna Durbin path. She plays Ginger’s cousin with a mean streak, unable to be controlled by her parents, Tom Tully and Spring Byington. Spring’s character isn’t the usual ditzy dame; she wants to give Ginger a fresh start but she also doesn’t trust her.
There’s a wonderful scene in which Ginger asks Joe what it’s like to be a soldier. He tells her it’s not like how the movies portray it, with hundreds of soldiers running on the beach. “The war’s about ten feet wide, and kind of empty. It’s you and a couple of fellows in your company, maybe, and maybe a couple of Japs. … I guess if you asked a hundred guys what the war’s like, they’d all give you a different answer.” Old movies sometimes get a reputation of being over-the-top and melodramatic, but this one is very subtle and realistic. If you’re looking for a somber holiday movie or a coming home movie you haven’t seen yet, check it out.
Want to watch it? Click here to see it on ok.ru and thanks "Alexander Colon" for posting!
More Joseph Cotten movies here!
It’s a different sort of role for both leads, showing an impressive range in their acting. Joe probably hated Dana Andrews, who was immortalized two years later for playing shell-shocked veteran Fred Derry in The Best Years of Our Lives. Ginger plays a guarded woman unused to kindness very well. Shirley Temple, unfortunately, was put in bratty teen roles in the early 1940s, rather than taking the Deanna Durbin path. She plays Ginger’s cousin with a mean streak, unable to be controlled by her parents, Tom Tully and Spring Byington. Spring’s character isn’t the usual ditzy dame; she wants to give Ginger a fresh start but she also doesn’t trust her.
There’s a wonderful scene in which Ginger asks Joe what it’s like to be a soldier. He tells her it’s not like how the movies portray it, with hundreds of soldiers running on the beach. “The war’s about ten feet wide, and kind of empty. It’s you and a couple of fellows in your company, maybe, and maybe a couple of Japs. … I guess if you asked a hundred guys what the war’s like, they’d all give you a different answer.” Old movies sometimes get a reputation of being over-the-top and melodramatic, but this one is very subtle and realistic. If you’re looking for a somber holiday movie or a coming home movie you haven’t seen yet, check it out.
Want to watch it? Click here to see it on ok.ru and thanks "Alexander Colon" for posting!
More Joseph Cotten movies here!