What Drew In '42

Still Rich Rewards in Random Harvest 

Given receipts and attendance for criteria, Random Harvest ranks high among 40’s best, but who grades films on basis of how much initial audiences liked them? Maybe we should try it though, and even watch ones like Random Harvest to grasp magic it wove. Radio City Music Hall was eleven weeks vested in Random Harvest, a record to then. Over a million and a half patrons showed up between December 17, 1942 and closing date of March 3, 1943. The feature ran through projectors over four hundred times. Five prints in 35mm were used up. On three days of the engagement, Dec.26 and 31, then Jan.2, Random Harvest was presented seven times per. For six successive days, beginning Dec. 26, the theatre opened at 7:45 am “to meet public demand” (stats courtesy MGM’s house organ, The Lion’s Roar, April 1943). Radio City bestowed awards on Metro staffers for the historic success, per photo above. Think Academy Awards were meaningful? These were better, as they reflected goings-on at ticket windows and what Loew bankers counted. Director Mervyn Le Roy, who estimated in a memoir that none of his films lost money (and was nearly right) said Random Harvest “could have played longer (at Radio City), except that Nicholas Schenck, MGM’s New York boss, wanted it to play the Loew’s circuit.” Music Hall management privately told Le Roy that Random Harvest had ten more weeks easy given the business it was doing.

There’s too little watching of Random Harvest today. Should Fathom Events use it for theatres? Yes, to crack rigidity of an old movie Top Forty to which all seem presently enslaved. Might Random Harvest have juice to surprise a crowded house? Too automatic a reflex says they won’t stand for Greer Garson. Reason? None other than entrenched notion of her belonging to a too-gone past. But then there’s the story, a good one, and well-adapted, plus Ronald Colman, who can be fresh in ways that William Powell stays fresh, and who’s to say old Hollywood can only be romantic with Cary Grant on a ship? Random Harvest is film’s definitive statement re amnesia. War trauma gives it, and a crosswalk mishap takes it away, melodrama we’re the poorer for progressing out of. We also get two Colmans, and so does Garson (possible tag line: “The Colmans are Back and Garson's Got Them … Both!”), his not exactly a dual role, though it seems so watching. What’s outlandish in synopsis does not play that way on screen. A thing done so well as this covers all potholes. You need a stone heart not to buy Random Harvest, which has too a midpoint waker-up to propel a second half like no other plot device could, 126 minutes going by the easier. If you know Random Harvest, you know the moment, which comes seventy-five minutes in, a huge jaw-drop for me the first time I watched. What I’d not give to have been at the Hall and hear gasps when that office door opens and … (tail-off in deference to readers with Random Harvest still in their future).

Put yourself in Young Actress category at MGM in 1942. Small parts, glamour work, maybe a carhop that stands out like Ava Gardner did in one of the Gillespies. A “B” lead or romantic partnering with a rising (or risen) star, Robert Taylor or maybe Van Johnson. Then there would come a role from which a future might be built, one to engage any or all watching, in or out of the industry. Such a character was “Kitty Chilcet” in Random Harvest. Susan Peters played it and was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress, an almost foregone conclusion among the many who longed for such a part as Peters got. I learned gravity of the contest from Leatrice Gilbert Fountain, daughter of John Gilbert and herself a player on occasion at Metro during the late 30’s and into the forties. I asked her about working where her father had been a leading light, her clearest recall the race to be “Kitty” in Random Harvest, and how close she came to the prize. We read of every actress wanting to be Scarlett O’Hara, but what of a multitude of parts near as promising, maybe more so at times they were cast? Random Harvest and “Kitty” was such a brass ring, at least according to Leatrice Gilbert. The character grows from precocious teenage to lovelorn young woman, pinching romantic thunder from Greer Garson through much of an Act Two where star Ronald Colman interacts with her. What Susan Peters got here was impetus toward stardom, much as Teresa Wright did in just-previous, and even higher profile, Mrs. Miniver. Fate, however, would intervene. Random Harvest is rich with many things, foregoing just a few of them. It streams at Vudu in HD, plays TCM similarly, and is on DVD.