Director: John Cromwell
Year Released: 1944
Rating: 2.5
Overlong melodrama that borrows a lot from Mrs. Miniver, especially the idea that a headstrong matriarch can hold together a family and do her part for the war effort (Claudette Colbert, in the most unlikely of scenarios, becomes ... a welder). Attempts at tear-jerking sentiment are mainly in the last act, where Colbert hears the story of an immigrant who has nothing but wonderful things to say about America, and the final scenes take place, most obviously, during the Christmas Holidays. Performances are decent (Colbert carries the movie), and David O. Selznick's script, for its sometimes weak emotional maneuverings (namely, an aspiring advertising man who we see once and whose father is introduced out of the blue) and flag-waving Super Patriotism, does come very close to conveying a profound statement regarding the Robert Walker character (a sacrificial lamb for the war effort): that some men, even though they are men, simply don't belong in a military uniform, and are not emotionally or mentally equipped to fight and therefore shouldn't - his shyness is linked with his inability to stand up to his grandfather and the shame he has in his past (he's more of a boy than a man, and his ultimate demise is foreshadowed numerous times - notably when he feels relief when Jennifer Jones said she'd feel bad for him if he died). It does, at times, seem like a knock-off of Wyler's great The Best Years of Our Lives, but that film actually came two years later.
