My Foolish Heart **** (1949, Susan Hayward, Dana Andrews, Kent Smith) – Classic Movie Review 5498

Director Mark Robson’s 1949 romantic tearjerker movie is a polished, winningly played and well-made heart-tugging drama, skilfully mixing the tears, heartaches and clinches.

It follows the romance between an innocent, lonely young woman named Eloise Winters (Susan Hayward) – who is unhappily married to a man called Lew Wengler (Kent Smith) – and a soldier, her true love, Walt Dreiser (Dana Andrews). It all starts when Mary Jane (Lois Wheeler) visits her old school friend Eloise, who drinks too much and remembers her days with Walt at the time of Pearl Harbor.

This is a highly competent tearjerker that is remembered by most people, if at all, for Victor Young (music) and Ned Washington (lyrics)’s Oscar-nominated title song ‘My Foolish Heart’ performed by Martha Mears) rather than for the film itself. That is a great shame because the acting is so enjoyable and the script is so emotionally stirring that the movie will make many romantically inclined viewers reach for their handkerchiefs at the climax.

Although it is rendered hardly recognisable in the finished screenplay by Julius J Epstein and Philip G Epstein, this is notable as still the sole film to be based on any story (here Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut) by J D Salinger, author of the classic Catcher in the Rye. It is taken from his volume Nine Short Stories, but Salinger was so disappointed with the changes made to his story, he never allowed any of his works to be adapted for film again. It is especially frustrating that there is no film of Catcher in the Rye.

Also in the cast are Robert Keith, Gigi Perreau, Jessie Royce Landis, Karin Booth, Philip Pine, Martha Mears, Edna Holland, Mariette Canty, Barbara Woodall, Regina Wallace, Jerry Paris, Phyllis Coates and Ed Peil Sr.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5498

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