JOURNEY FOR MARGARET (65)

Directed by: W.S. Van Dyke (1942)

Starring: Robert Young, Laraine Day, Margaret O'Brien, Fay Bainter

The Pitch: During the London Blitz, a cynical war journalist has his heart melted by a pair of orphaned kids.

Theo Sez: Stiff-upper-lippery, MRS. MINIVER-style (indeed, the two films were neck-and-neck on 1942 critics' lists), plus a pair of 5-year-old kids as Our Hope For The Future : it would be unpalatable in any other context - but this is a film made when the Blitz was at its height (and the war far from won), and it shows. Even beyond the directorial credit for "Major W.S. Van Dyke" and the opening dedication ("The Margaret of this story is real. She hopes, with the rest of us, for everlasting peace after this war is won"), a certain quiet sobriety is the order of the day, unostentatious but also uncompromising : it's a shock to see this no-frills depiction of the Blitz - people screaming in air-raid shelters or sobbing on the street, dead-eyed and homeless - or to see traumatised kids shown without euphemism : you might say it's a precursor for the post-War realism of Elia Kazan (and the bit where little O'Brien lets go her bottled-up emotion in great racking sobs is almost as moving as the similar scene in A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN). Like Kazan's films it's didactic rather than genuinely "realist" at heart - exposing, and perhaps exaggerating, Londoners' suffering not for its own sake but for propaganda purposes - but even that is intriguing, the way it aims to shock people out of their exhaustion (we tend to forget how tired of the War everyone must've become in the 40s), making its hero a cynical American reporter who's lost his stomach for the good fight, who has to "get mad" to become human. It's admittedly a little silly when he wanders through a bombed-out London yelling "All right, I'm mad now! Mad at Nazi bombs that kill little children! God, give me the strength - give me the wisdom - to stay mad!" ; yet, across the decades, the rallying-cry remains powerful.