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| Joseph Cotten and Merle Oberon in Lydia |
Cast: Merle Oberon, Joseph Cotten, Alan Marshal, Edna May Oliver, Hans Jaray, George Reeves, John Halliday, Sara Allgood. Screenplay: Julien Duvivier, Leslie Bush-Fekete, Ben Hecht, Samuel Hoffenstein. Cinematography: Lee Garmes. Production design: Vincent Korda. Film editing: William Hornbeck. Music: Miklós Rózsa.
Produced by Alexander Korda with his usual opulent taste as a showcase for his wife, Merle Oberon, Julien Duvivier's Lydia takes a sentimental romance and subtly undercuts its romanticism. Oberon's Lydia starts out as a giddy girl under the watchful eye of her grandmother (Edna May Oliver), who thrills to her first ball, keeps the sensible man who is infatuated with her at arm's length, falls for a football player and almost elopes with him, turns to charitable work with blind children, meets a blind pianist and composer who also falls for her, has a passionate affair that ends badly, and decides to stay unmarried and concentrate on charity work. The film is structured as a flashback -- with flashbacks inside flashbacks -- from a reunion with her old flames: the sensible Michael (Joseph Cotten), the quarterback Bob, and the pianist Frank (Hans Jaray). Richard (Alan Marshal), the passionate fling, is invited, but doesn't show until the end, when he makes the film's point: we remember what we want to remember, and not what actually happened. The production values, including Lee Garmes's cinematography, Vincent Korda's sets, and Miklós Rózsa's score, are first-rate, although the old-age makeup in which the principals spend most of the film isn't entirely convincing. Lydia is a little too leisurely in its story-telling, and while its ironic anti-romantic structure and ending give the film some bite, they feel at odds with the romantic fluffiness of its production.
