Love Story [A Lady Surrenders] **** (1944, Margaret Lockwood, Stewart Granger, Patricia Roc) – Classic Movie Review 6968

Co-writer/ director Leslie Arliss 1944 black and white British wartime romantic melodrama is something just as engagingly soppy as the famous 1970 Ryan O’Neal-Ali MacGraw Love Story. This one is made by Gainsborough Pictures and stars Margaret Lockwood as Lissa Campbell, a terminally ill piano-composer and concert pianist with only a few months to live because of a serious heart problem.

Lissa decides to spend her last days in Cornwall, where she meets and falls in love with Kit Firth (Stewart Granger),  a former RAF pilot and mining engineer going blind after a bomb explosion while he was on active service. But Kit is already claimed by Judy (the alluring Patricia Roc), his jealous childhood sweetheart who will not let him have an operation.

Lockwood sets off for North Africa to entertain the troops. Famous old comic actor Tom Walls plays Granger’s mining colleague, Tom Tanner, the bluff Yorkshireman who holds the key to a possible happy ending. Oh the tangled webs these writers weave! Let’s name the writers. Leslie Arliss, Doreen Montgomery and Rodney Ackland’s screenplay is based on a short story by J W Drawbell. Arliss said he was also inspired by the magazine stories Love and Forget, The Ship Sailed at Night and A Night in Algiers.

Yes Love Story is silly, but it is compulsively silly, and played to the hilt and beyond by the sparkling stars. The Forties public’s affection for the stars, the verve of the handling and the musical breaks (including Hubert Bath’s Cornish Rhapsody theme) turned this Hollywood-style fantasy into a British wartime hit. It may be tosh but it is still pretty irresistible. Just think, if Hollywood had made it, it could have starred Bette Davis and Claude Rains and been even more spiffing maybe.

An advert for Love Story in Sydney, Australia (1946).

Also in the cast are Reginald Purdell, Moira Lister, Dorothy Bramhall, Joan Rees, Walter Hudd, A E Matthews, Josephine Middleton, Beatrice Varley, Laurence Hanray, Brian Herbert, Roy Emerton, George Merritt, Sidney Beer and Vincent Holman.

Arliss’s film is produced by Gainsborough Pictures and is filmed on location at the Minack Theatre in Porthcurno in Cornwall, England, and at the Royal Albert Hall in London for the final concert scenes, as well as in the studio at Gaumont-British Studios in Lime Grove, Shepherd’s Bush, London.

Love Story (known as A Lady Surrenders in the US) is directed by Leslie Arliss, runs 112 minutes, is made by Gainsborough Pictures, is released by Eagle-Lion in the UK and Universal in the US, is written by Leslie Arliss, Doreen Montgomery and Rodney Ackland, based on a short story by J W Drawbell, shot in black and white by Bernard Knowles, produced by Harold Huth, is scored by Louis Levy, with music by Hubert Bath and productions designs by John Bryan.

Costing £125,000, it was a big hit at home in Britain in 1944.

Love Story [A Lady Surrenders] was long available on VHS in The Margaret Lockwood Collection. It is available on DVD in The Rank Collection.

Granger was making Waterloo Road at the same time. Gainsborough was bombed while making Love Story, which he recalled as ‘a load of crap – and a smash hit!’

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 6968

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