Love in the Age of the En-Lightning-Ment

When we last left Tyrone Power, he was playing a journalist named Stephen Fitzgerald who was journeying to the Emerald Isle to meet cute with his future love interest. This time out in the 1951 movie I'll Never Forget You, he is a scientist named Peter Standish who is visiting Mother England in order to participate in a very important atomic experiment, only to end up traveling back in time via lightning bolt to the Age of Enlightenment where he promptly changes places with a rich American who is preparing to wed a charming young damsel who just happens to be the beautiful daughter of a local aristocrat. Nice work if you can get it, eh?

Unfortunately, life in 1784 England does not quite suit Standish as much as he would have supposed and to make matters worse, he keeps giving away the fact that he knows so much about the locals' future. In short, he is just ignorant enough of eighteenth century ways to attract the suspicions of the locals and too knowledgeable enough about things his counterpart would not know to win their trust. As if Standish's life is not complicated enough, he finds himself falling for the sister of his counterpart's intended, a scandalous complication in any century.

Will Standish be able to win over the good people of 1784 London? Or will he end up in an insane asylum?

Since this movie is not billed as an example of alternative history, it does not take a lot of imagination to guess that the eventual ending will be a less than happy one. Indeed, this movie has one of the most depressing endings for a romantic movie that I have seen in a long while.

Yet it gives nothing away to note that it hints at an ultimately happy ending for Standish as well. Add to that the witticisms of Dennis Price as Standish's British “cousin” -- one of those black sheep relatives who is inevitably more fun to listen to than the white lamb kinfolk -- and the movie is actually quite watchable. After all, it is hard to hate a movie that has enough confidence in its audience to not only include Dr. Samuel Johnson as a character but to do so without going out of its way to explain who he was or why he was so famous. And I must confess that I find it amusing to see yet another old movie which treats marriage between cousins as no big deal while most modern Americans I know would regard the same idea with horror.

Besides, after having seen my share of “time travel for dummies” movies, I could not help finding it refreshing to finally see a movie that had a fairly realistic attitude about how a visitor from the future would be received in real life. After all, as my father used to note whenever he and I were watching old syndicated reruns of Time Tunnel, it is not like we sophisticated people in the modern era would automatically accept the word of a person who claimed to be from our future. Indeed, if such a person turned up in Washington D.C., he or she would be very lucky if he or she did not vanish into the clutches of Homeland Security. And that is just one of the more optimistic scenarios.

While I must admit that it would be fun to see a movie in which such a traveler actually did change history, I am not sure I trust modern Hollywood to bring off such a story with the same panache we see in I'll Never Forget You. Mind you, I will admit that title needs work. But apart from that, I found it quite memorable.

To Thine Own Celt Be True

Aye and begorrah! If it isn't everyone's favorite swashbuckler* Tyrone Power playing the part of one Stephen Fitzgerald in the 1948 film The Luck of the Irish. And is not it just great that Fitzgerald just happens to be an Irish-American freelance journalist -- not to be confused with one F. Scott Fitzgerald -- who has gone back to the old sod on his way back to New York from Europe? And who should he come across in this odd enchanted land save a not so wee member of the wee folk (played by Cecil Kellaway). A leprechaun, that is, who looks uncannily like the guy who played Veronica Lake's father in I Married a Witch.

Fortunately, Power's adventures with the supernatural prove a lot more benign in this movie than Fredric March's were in I Married a Witch. If anything, one may say they prove too benign. Fitzgerald wins over the trust and affection of a centuries-old shoemaker so quickly that one might be tempted to dismiss the whole affair as a load of cobblers.

But then Fitzgerald meets Nora (played by Anne Baxter), a local colleen whose charm is such that she may be a supernatural being as well. Unfortunately, Fitzgerald is also engaged to a rich American girl named Frances (played by Jayne Meadows) and has promised to take a job with her father David Augur (played by Lee J. Cobb), a powerful newspaperman seeking to make a run for the Senate. Fitzgerald does not agree with many of David Augur's political stands but he finds the combination of Frances' glamour and her father's money to be a powerful temptation.

Of course, one does not have to have seen many American movies to guess whom Fitzgerald will choose when he is forced to decide between the poor and humble Nora and the not-so-poor and not-so-humble Frances. But I must admit I found the way to that decision to be quite interesting. However, I did find it unusual to see a movie made in the Yankee Doodle Dandy era which actually encouraged the audience to cheer on a fellow who ultimately chose to emigrate back to his ancestral homeland rather than to stay and make a go of it in America -- moreover, one which encouraged the audience to applaud his decision to pass over a nice red-blooded American girl in favor of some foreigner.

Then again, if I had a certain bright-eyed colleen waiting for me in the Emerald Isle, I would be tempted to make the same choices Stephen Fitzgerald ultimately made -- and I would not need any supernatural intervention to help me make up my mind.

* Apart from Errol Flynn, natch.