Mark Robson's My Foolish Heart 1949

Eloise shook Mary Jane's arm.  "I was a nice girl," she pleaded, "wasn't I?"
---J.D. Salinger

My Foolish Heart is based on J.D. Salinger's short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut", published in The New Yorker in 1948.  Salinger supposedly hated the movie so much that he never allowed anything else to be sold for that purpose (Jerry Lewis tried for years to buy the rights to Catcher in the Rye and I think he would have done a great job as director and star).  Unless Salinger had never seen a movie (which is possible) it's hard to see what exactly his objections were.  The story is just a conversation between Eloise and Mary Jane and though I think it would make an interesting sixty-minute film or stage piece, one can't blame the filmmakers for expanding on the conversation and filling in the details, which I think was handled quite effectively.

The film was written by Julius and Phillip Epstein (who wrote Casablanca, 1942, among other films), photographed by the estimable Lee Garmes (a master of light and shadow, who did John Ford's The Sun Shines Bright in 1953), scored by Victor Young (Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow in 1953) and starred Susan Hayward and Dana Andrews.  Readers of this blog know I prefer directors who varnish their films with their own personal style, but there are also directors such as Mark Robson and Michael Curtiz who can produce resonant work if they have a good script, skillful actors, and a strong producer.  My Foolish Heart was produced by Samuel Goldwyn who responded to someone's suggestion that William Wyler "made" Wuthering Heights (1939) by saying "I made Wuthering Heights, Wyler only directed it."  Robson's films considerably vary in quality; the best of his other films that I have seen is the eerie The Seventh Victim, 1943, produced by Val Lewton.

My Foolish Heart is a weepie melodrama very much of its time, without the humor of Leo McCarey. the romanticism of Frank Borzage, the irony of Douglas Sirk or the dreamlike mise-en-scene of Vincente Minnelli; it just has genuine tear-jerking, i.e., sentiment without sentimentality.   Susan Hayward falls in love with soldier Dana Andrews and becomes pregnant just before Andrews is killed in a training accident after Pearl Harbor, the accident only shown in the startled face of another soldier to whom Andrews gave an unfinished letter for Hayward,  Hayward marries Kent Smith on the rebound and passes off her child as Smith's while descending into alcoholism in Connecticut. ,Hayward's marriage ends and she stays with her young daughter in the final scene, gazing on her daughter as she did on Andrews when she first met him.  Most of the film takes place at night or in the rain, suggesting the sorrow and sadness caused by war, its victims and its aftermath.