![]() Although his teenage step-niece Kitty (Susan Peters) develops a crush on him, Charles’s business activities take up all his time, and he doesn’t seem interested in romance. After a few years, Charles’s business activities are so successful that newspapers are touting him as the “Industrial Prince of England”. ![]() Although Charles had wanted to resume his academic pursuits, he discovers that the family estate’s business assets are in disarray, and he takes over their management. The now-rehabilitated Charles returns to the Ranier estate and learns that his father has just died and that he is to come into a substantial inheritance. He is now Charles Ranier once again, but with a three-year gap in his memory. When Smithy wakes up in a hospital, he has recovered his memory of being Charles Ranier, but has forgotten all about his existence as Smithy, including his memory and awareness of his beloved Paula. When he arrives in Liverpool, though, he is hit by a taxi on the street and suffers another traumatic head injury. He travels to Liverpool alone, because Paula is looking after their newborn child. Smithy gradually evinces a talent for writing and in 1920 gets an offer from a newspaper publisher in Liverpool to come there to be interviewed for a position. Smithy and Paula are enjoying a blissful life and madly in love. The film’s protagonist (played by Ronald Colman) embodies two separate persona at different times in the story: Although the film is enjoyable, its narrative presentation doesn’t have this twist and suffers accordingly. This is because the novel contains a major plot element that leads to a dramatic twist at the end of the story, which is key to the novel’s special appeal. If you don’t know anything about the story of Random Harvest and are thinking of reading the novel, I suggest you stop reading this review after this paragraph and read the novel first (as I happened to do). There are some implausible elements to this narrative, but it does concern a basic truth about all of us: our self-conceptions are built out of the narratives we construct about ourselves and that are held in our memories. He is physically okay, but he doesn’t know who he is. ![]() The story of this film concerns a shell-shocked soldier from World War I who is suffering from amnesia. This is the poignant theme of Random Harvest, too. A common feature of Hilton’s romantic stories is the depiction of a protagonist in search of sustained bliss who allows mundane concerns to distract him from recognizing that the path to his goal has been right there in front of him all the time. The film was based on the best-selling 1941 novel of the same name by James Hilton, two earlier best-selling novels of whose had also been made into highly popular films – Lost Horizon (novel - 1933, film version - 1937) and Goodbye, Mr. Random Harvest (1942) is a romantic drama directed by Mervyn LeRoy that was a hit at the box office and received seven Oscar (US Academy Award) nominations (for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Screenplay, Best Score, and Best Art Direction).
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