Since You Went Away

After winning back-to-back Best Picture Oscars with Gone with the Wind and Rebecca, super-producer David O. Selznick returned with this three-hour long Homefront drama. Since You Went Away was Selznick’s contribution to morale boosting cinema, and a clear swipe at making an American version of Mrs. Miniver. It is overly long, heavily sentimental to its detriment, and stretched past the breaking point, but there’s still charms to be found here.

The main selling point of this movie is a handful of strong performances, but none of them quite as grounded, intelligent, and honest as Claudette Colbert in the central role. Since there’s so much material thrown into this thing, Colbert gets a chance to play a large variety of moods and scenes and she does all of them with grace. The final scene’s mawkish, nearly violent insistence on tear-wringing is practically earned by the way she shakes with emotional excitement and relief, and it plays in glorious harmony with a scene just a few moments earlier of her quietly, somberly opening a Christmas gift from her deployed husband. This would prove Colbert’s final Oscar nomination, coming ten years after her win in the fizzy, sophisticated It Happened One Night, and it was a well-earned and deserved nod for her.

While the likes of Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, and Hattie McDaniel get sacked with their common character types, respectively likable rogue, catty socialite, and sassy maid, the likes of Monty Woolley, Robert Walker, and Jennifer Jones turn in more unique supporting work. Woolley comes on like a gruff elder, but there’s a few late moments with his grandson that reveal depths to his character that the film refuses to allow him to fully explore. Instead, Woolley deserved that Oscar nomination alone for keeping his dignity by being sacked with scene after scene of awkward comedy between him and the family dog, a bulldog named Soda.

Walker and Jones are a more unique case of the personal bleeding into the fictional. In real life they were drifting apart as Jones was beginning her affair with Selznick, the man who would become her Svengali, and on the cusp of divorcing. Jones completely buries this personal drama in her performance and romantic scenes, whereas Walker very much does not. Jones films younger but plays her girlishness too big and broad in the early moments before settling in during the meatier scenes, and Walker both looks and sounds too old for his role due to a severe problem with alcohol. Their romantic scenes are palpably tense and awkward, and a scene with a young (and incredibly beautiful) Guy Madison throbs with interpersonal drama. Madison and Walker get into a passive-aggressive argument and it’s easy to read Walker project his anguish and anger towards Selznick onto Madison in this moment while Jones wails in the background for peace.

Even better, for both parties, is their farewell scene at the train station. Jones finally stops keeping the personal demons at bay and embraces them during this scene. There’s an intensity to their goodbyes that goes beyond the confines of the characters and this scene, and the sight of Jones desperately trying to keep up with the train and screaming out “I love you darling” is alternately discomforting and touching. This feels like the emotional apex of the film, but then Since You Went Away just keeps going on.

The major problem and success of Since You Went Away is all Selznick. He assembles a strong ensemble of actors, deploys a series of smart narrative ideas, and then doesn’t know when enough is enough. This is not a movie that needed an overture, intermission, and entrance music, but there it is eating away at the running time. Not only that, but Selznick never knows when to stop adding and the last minute addition of Colbert befriending a Polish-Jewish immigrant is a needless diversion in a film filled with them. There’s Selznick persistent inability to stick to a tone, and in-between the plainspoken drama are diverging moments of broad comedy or maudlin weeping. Since You Went Away wants to pack in all of the emotions just for the sake of it, and suffers from Selznick’s demands that things be epic without a reason behind them.

There’s too many lovely details and small moments, the performance of Colbert is too strong, and there’s a splendid romanticism that lingers in its best moments to completely write off the film. Yet it’s equaled by a distinct lack of personality, a demand to be taken as something vital and important even when it’s emotionally inert and punishingly long. Since You Went Away is proof-positive that transparent Oscar bait is nearly as old as the institution itself, and just as complicated a piece of art/commerce as that albatross moniker implies.