Do you know what loneliness is—real loneliness?

Tonight derspatchel and I saw Fritz Lang's Western Union (1941), a film I cannot honestly recommend despite its gorgeous Technicolor location shots and a strong lead performance from Randolph Scott. I had never actually seen him in a movie, only in photographs with Cary Grant. As Vance Blake, he's lanky, conflicted, not at all wooden; he has a lean, cautious face and his hair is startlingly gold when he takes off his hat, although he's not young. Very rarely, we see him smile. (A woman gives him the cameo she wears as a necklace, cloud-white on blue; he loves her, but never says it. He says he met her too late.) Nothing about his story is intrinsically Western; replace his outlaw's past with a gangster's life of crime and he'd fit right into a film noir, right down to the stubborn, silent loyalties that keep him from walking away from the gang shadowing him in his new, honest life. I suspect it would have been a better film as a noir. Maybe then Lang could have done something about the artificial injections of slapstick and the unwatchably racist elements—as in, I closed my eyes rather than watch some of the scenes with the Lakota characters. We were unsurprised to read afterward that Lang rewrote the entire script when he got the project and the studio made him write it right back. You can see the film he wanted in the traces of what's there, but that's not the film you get. The score also sounds like it was grafted on after the fact, but at least that's an aesthetic problem, not an actively offensive and demeaning series of script choices. Which were in no way necessary to the plot! It would have been a stronger film without them! And that was sad.

So I don't really want to talk about Western Union. Instead I am going to use Robert Young (who co-starred; less interesting than elsewhere) as a springboard to The Enchanted Cottage (1945), which I saw once in 2008 and never wrote about. I think I promised it to asakiyume years ago. Blame Tiny Wittgenstein for the delay!

Almost unconditionally, I love this movie. I watched it with my mother on TCM and it amazed me, partly for what it did and so much for what it didn't do. It's a romance with a mysterious twist; its theme is the transformative power of love; it's framed by a blind pianist playing for the first time a tone poem called "The Enchanted Cottage." It should have been as treacly as thar cakes, with sticky wish-fulfillment fingerprints left all over the scenery. What it reads most like is a version of Beauty and the Beast in which each of the lovers takes both parts in turn and the story plays fair with them. All sorts of spoilers and that jazz. It is impossible for me to talk about my reasons for loving this movie without discussing the plot.

Laura Pennington (Dorothy McGuire) is not a beautiful girl. Newly arrived in a small town in New England in 1940 to answer an ad for a maid-of-all-work, she is unkindly but not inaccurately described by a local boy as "terrible homely"—which in Hollywood usually means a bombshell with glasses, but in truth she's round-faced, heavy-browed, with flatly cut hair and gawky shoulders; her clothes hang on her as slackly as a clothesline and she carries herself with a flinching consciousness of the space she occupies, someone who learned early on that the best she can hope for is to be ignored. The titular cottage is all that remains of a grand colonial-era estate, now a popular getaway for honeymooning couples. Legend says it's haunted, just as the town kids all know that Mrs. Minnett (Mildred Natwick, a tart sibyl) who owns it is a witch; burnt and rebuilt fragment of a manor house that it is, its windows scratched all over with newlywed names, Laura loves the place and Mrs. Minnett takes her on. Soon there's a war on. With fewer honeymoons and more work for the home front, Laura washes dishes at the canteen, bitterly endures the nights when soldiers glance at her once and then guiltily ask some other girl to dance. She's not happy, exactly, but perhaps she has stopped expecting to be. In her spare time, she noodles around on the piano and works on her woodcuts.

And in 1943, she is still at the cottage to run into Oliver Bradford (Robert Young), whom she met once with his fiancée before the war. Then he was a jaunty flier with a gorgeous girl on his arm, a young blood with old money, despairing of his socially proper mother and stepfather and cheerfully confident that the woman he loves understands him better than anyone else in the world. He tries to scratch their names into the cottage window with her engagement diamond—jumping the gun of the cottage's tradition—so sure of himself, he's not even discouraged when the rock pops loose. A ring's a formality. They're modern lovers; no need to hurry into the church just because his draft card's come up. They'll marry when he returns, a hero, probably. Come 1942 and he's shot down in flames over Java. He used to be right-handed and win prizes for polo and tennis; now he walks stiffly and uses his left hand for everything. His face is not unrecognizably disfigured, which perhaps makes the scarring across the left side worse: he looks like himself pulled out of true, asymmetrically into a sneer. Why not? He has nothing but contempt for himself, the former daredevil who now chokes and covers his ears in thunderstorms. His mother wants nothing more than to cosset him, his stepfather to talk him briskly out of his weakness man-to-man, and that soulmate of his? She made him a promise; she'll go through with it . . . Out of his last vestiges of cope, Oliver flees to the cottage, where Laura walks in on him as he contemplates his serviceman's pistol perhaps a touch too thoughtfully, and because she knew him before and doesn't recoil from him now, he talks to her. In snappish fits and starts at first, but he remembers how to apologize. When he tells her she couldn't possibly understand what it's like to have people always looking away from her or looking only with pity, at least he has the grace to shut up before she tells him to. In turn, to her surprise, when she speaks of the cottage's history, how much she loves its strange sense of stopped time and the ghosts of lovers she feels haunting the air—the magic she believes could still be summoned up—he listens to her.

( It wouldn't make much difference if I were a rare and exotic hothouse fruit, Mother—there's a war on! )

I find it fascinating that the original play was written in the wake of World War I as a kind of reassurance to wounded soldiers. There's an earlier silent version I haven't seen; it stars Richard Barthelmess. Perhaps, when he was Oliver, he was the main character. The protagonist of the 1945 version is very clearly Laura. That is one of the other things I like.

Naturally, Netflix hasn't even heard of it. Try libraries? I must sleep.