(2 of 2)
The Selznick Touch. What makes Since You Went Away sure-fire is in part its homely subject matter, which has never before been so earnestly tackled in a film, in part its all-star acting (everybody registers with all his might, down to Lionel Barrymore's few seconds as a preacher and Newcomer Guy Madison's brief, effective appearance as a sailor), most of all David Selznick's extremely astute screen play and production.
Selznick has given Claudette Colbert the richest, biggest role of her career. She rewards him consistently with smooth Hollywood formula acting, and sometimes—especially in collaboration with Mr. Gotten—with flashes of acting that are warmer and more mature. He has brought his newest find, Jennifer (The Song of Bernadette) Jones out of the cloister and made her an All-American girl. She rewards him with a nervous, carefully studied, somewhat overintense performance. Selznick placed a big bet on Shirley Temple's comeback and she pays off enchantingly as a dogged, sensitive, practical little girl with a talent for bargaining.
Yard-Wide Americanism. Though idealized, the Selznick characterizations are authentic to a degree seldom achieved in Hollywood. When a high-school graduating class sings America the Beautiful, the voices are touchingly inchoate, the singers' faces as stolidly reverent, and the shot of the Lincoln statue which begins the song and the meowing cat which ends it, are a deft, valid blend of showmanship, humor and yard-wide Americanism. The wounded men in Since You Went Away really look wounded, for almost the first time in a U.S. fiction war film. There are scores of such evidences of a smart showman's eye, mind and heart. Added up, they give the picture taste, shrewdness, superiority, life. Now & then the idealization runs too far ahead of the normal reality. But by & large the blend of flesh and fantasy is pretty close to Hiltonesque life in the U.S. Home.
* Rebecca, released after GWTW, was finished by the time GWTW was premiered.