Ronald Colman

Random Harvest

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Charles in military uniform

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 … Read more

100 Years of… Lady Windermere’s Fan

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Irene Rich as Mrs Erlynne

Mary Pickford once described the director Ernst Lubitsch as a “director of doors”. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play, you can see what she means. She meant it dismissively, though the door, and what’s behind it – or not – is key to Lubitsch’s work generally, and specifically here. This is a story all about secrets – as Wilde’s so often were – a tale of mistaken identity with ironic distance between what the people on the screen imagine themselves to be and how the audience sees them. To thumbnail-sketch a delicately intertwined plot, it centres on Lady Windermere, who is in love with her husband but being pressed … Read more