This week’s mystery movie has been the 1945 RKO picture “The Enchanted Cottage,” starring Dorothy McGuire, Robert Young, Herbert Marshall, Mildred Natwick, Spring Byington, Hillary Brooke, Richard Gaines, Alec Englander, Robert Clarke and Eden Nicholas. The screenplay was by DeWitt Bodeen and Herman J. Mankiewicz, adapted from a play by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. The film was photographed by Ted Tetzlaff, with special effects by Vernon Walker, with art direction by Albert S. D’Agostino and Carroll Clark. Music was by Roy Webb, orchestrated by Gil Grau and conducted by C. Bakaleinikoff. The producer was Harriet Parsons and the director was John Cromwell.
As Michael Ryerson noted, “The Enchanted Cottage” was also made as a silent in 1924 starring Richard Barthelmess and May McAvoy. The play was first produced in London in 1921, prompted by the British government to lift the morale of soldiers who were injured or traumatized by World War I. RKO bought the property in 1929 as a vehicle for Helen Twelvetrees and revived it in the late 1930s as a project for Ginger Rogers, but neither film was made.
David O. Selznick loaned McGuire to RKO for the film after she made “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” at Fox, according to the New York Times. Cromwell was also under contract to Selznick, as was Alan Marshal, who was previously cast as the male lead according to the New York Times.
The film opened in Los Angeles at the Pantages theater in Hollywood and the RKO Hillstreet in downtown Los Angeles.
In a May 28, 1945, review, Los Angeles Times critic Edwin Schallert faulted the updated version of the film, saying: “For those who know ‘The Enchanted Cottage’ the picture is jarring at the outset. This is partly due to setting it in America, and bringing it up to date. It becomes inevitably a slap at the plastic surgery of today, because there seems no sound reason why Young should appear as disfigured as he does, due to being a war casualty, in view of modern scientific progress.”
He concluded: “With its faults properly discounted one can proceed to appraise ‘The Enchanted Cottage’ as both a pleasing and a moving novelty in its basic attraction. It might have been made to better advantage in some other age than right now, but at least it has the merit of departing tellingly in its finest scenes, which are very excellent indeed, from the routines of entertainment.”
The film is available from Warner Archive for $16.59. It will air Feb. 22 on TCM.
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“Seven Years Bad Luck” at Tally’s Broadway, June 21, 1921.
ladailymirror.com 