Random Harvest takes the amnesiac plot used and abused by mid-20th-century moviemakers and pushes it into and beyond the realm of the absurd. Audiences at the time loved it, the film was multi-Oscar nominated and even though it ascends into madness fairly early on, it’s a fabulous madness, confected by MGM with all the lush plushness the studio could engineer.
Ronald Colman is too old by a stretch but let’s put that to one side as we watch him playing a soldier who is back from the First World War and languishing in an asylum with PTSD and amnesia. In short order he accidentally gets free, meets a showgirl and strikes up a relationship with her. Eventually the two of them marry. She knows him as Smithy, while he knows her by her real name, Paula.
Though he still doesn’t remember who he is, Smithy and Paula appear to be home free. Smithy’s spirit recovered, at least, the two of them are living in a bucolic shimmer – a cottage with roses literally around the door – when Smithy is knocked down by a car. Suddenly, Smithy is gone, locked away in the forgotten corners of a damaged mind, and the old identity is back in charge. From here on out it’s Charles Rainier all the way.
Charles, it turns out, is from a wealthy family. So this turn of events is working out alright for him, if not for the forgotten wife who has no idea what’s happened to her husband. But as Charles re-establishes himself in his old life, soon becoming “the industrial prince of England”, a series of flukes and some manoeuvring by Paula throw the two of them together for an almost agonisingly protracted “when will he recognise it’s her?” drama complicated by the fact that a pretty young thing, Kitty (Susan Peters), is making mad eyes at Charles while Paula looks on, the wife now posing as one of Charles’s employees.
Got all that? The triumph of Random Harvest is the extent to which the writers – starting with James Hilton, who wrote the original novel – are prepared to push this scenario. Putting Paula and Charles into ever-tighter, ever more compromising situations – platonic always – it’s as if they present one plot turn after another with a flourish, and then stand back to admire their handiwork.
Both Smithy and Charles are decent chaps – nature not nurture, clearly – but in fact everyone behaves frightfully decently in this film and when it comes to crunch decisions, the greatest good for the greatest number is generally the way things pan out. Casablanca and Brief Encounter were both suffused with the same ethos. There is a war on in 1942, let’s not forget.
Colman’s mahogany Hollywood tan is out of place in overcast England and at nearly 50 he’s properly too old for the role, but his performance glides like a skater moving at such speed over thin ice that it doesn’t have time to crack. Greer Garson is even better as Paula and it’s her film really. She is excellent early on, as the showgirl brimming with life and energy, and even better later on, as the wife who loses her husband and then gets him back, albeit in a hugely compromised form.
In a sense we’re in the realm of the mad Douglas Sirk film, where a ratcheting plot subjects the characters to pressure-testing. Perhaps it’s not as thoughtful as Sirk’s movies but Random Harvest does pose a question about the desirability of going back in time to reclaim an old identity.
Wistful, hopeful, it is a portrait of humanity at its best, in many respects, made by a studio that’s thrown the best in the business at the craft side of things. Mervyn LeRoy directs with a fluid camera, cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg subtly shifts the lighting from shadowy to opulent as the film progresses. Sets, clothes, hair and make-up, it’s all very glam.
Best of all, for all its eccentricity, the film works because it sticks with its own mad logic. The result is immersive, as no one in 1942 ever said. You lose yourself in the plot, is what they might have said. Forget yourself, even?
Random Harvest – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
