The Gift of Love * (1958, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, Evelyn Rudie) – Classic Movie Review 6311

Director Jean Negulesco’s 1958 drama is a simply ghastly, uber-treacly remake of 1946’s Sentimental Journey (with John Payne and Maureen O’Hara), this time with the wrong stars in Robert Stack and Lauren Bacall as physicist Bill Beck and his dying wife Julie, who adopts an orphan called Hitty (Evelyn Rudie) so that her husband will still have someone to love him when she is gone.

[Spoiler alert] When Bacall’s Julie shuffles off this mortal coil, Stack’s Bill doesn’t take to the fantasising orphan Hitty (Rudie) and pops her back in the orphanage. But then old Julie returns as a ghost to steer everything towards a happy ending.

Luther Davis’s screenplay is based on the short story The Little Horse by Nelia Gardner White, originally published in a 1944 issue of Good Housekeeping.

Also in the cast are Lorne Greene, Anne Seymour, Joseph Kearns and Edward Platt.

It is shot in CinemaScope widescreen by Milton R Krasner, produced by Charles Brackett and scored by Cyril J Mockridge.

It is a career-damaging movie for all concerned.

It was remade in 1984 as the TV movie Sentimental Journey with Jaclyn Smith.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 6311

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