THE DIVIDED HEART is a touching and often very moving account of a 10-year-old boy who had been adopted as a 3-year-old child after World War II by a German couple (played by Cornell Borchers and Armin Dahlen.)
The family lives in a Bavarian Alpine village where the boy, Toni, an intelligent and sensitive lad, goes to school, enjoys skiing, and could not be any happier. Toni's 10th birthday party is interrupted by a man and a woman from the International Refugee Organization.
They bring the unsettling news that Toni was in fact Ivan Slavko, a Yugoslav, and his mother Sonja is alive and wants her son back. The question posed by the film is the obvious and painful one. Should the child be allowed to live with the adoptive parents who raised him and love him or with this "stranger" who is his mother in the flesh?
It becomes the task of the postwar U.S. Court of the Allied High Commission for Germany to determine justice, a justice that must inevitably be accompanied by injustice to either real or adoptive parents.
(SPOILERS FOLLOW). This is a film without villains, save war itself which separates children from parents. In the courtroom episode during which the custody of the child is determined, the judge acknowledges with humane wisdom the tragic aspects of the issue. The real mother is awarded the custody of the child.
"It is time," says the court,"for the son to give love to a mother rather than receive it. By returning the boy to his real mother, we are giving the custody of the mother to the son rather than the son to the mother."
The movie is sensitively directed by Charles Crichton and performed by a remarkable ensemble of performers, especially Cornell Borchers as the adoptive mother and Yvonne Mitchell as the real mother, but the film belongs to child actor Michel Ray who gives the role subtle nuances and comprehension not normally associated with child performers. One of the reasons he landed the role is that he could ski (as we see him do in opening sequences.) Later in life Michel Ray, As Michel de Carvalho, achieved some fame as a medal-winning Olympic skier and was immensely successful in the world of business.
The family lives in a Bavarian Alpine village where the boy, Toni, an intelligent and sensitive lad, goes to school, enjoys skiing, and could not be any happier. Toni's 10th birthday party is interrupted by a man and a woman from the International Refugee Organization.
They bring the unsettling news that Toni was in fact Ivan Slavko, a Yugoslav, and his mother Sonja is alive and wants her son back. The question posed by the film is the obvious and painful one. Should the child be allowed to live with the adoptive parents who raised him and love him or with this "stranger" who is his mother in the flesh?
It becomes the task of the postwar U.S. Court of the Allied High Commission for Germany to determine justice, a justice that must inevitably be accompanied by injustice to either real or adoptive parents.
(SPOILERS FOLLOW). This is a film without villains, save war itself which separates children from parents. In the courtroom episode during which the custody of the child is determined, the judge acknowledges with humane wisdom the tragic aspects of the issue. The real mother is awarded the custody of the child.
"It is time," says the court,"for the son to give love to a mother rather than receive it. By returning the boy to his real mother, we are giving the custody of the mother to the son rather than the son to the mother."
The movie is sensitively directed by Charles Crichton and performed by a remarkable ensemble of performers, especially Cornell Borchers as the adoptive mother and Yvonne Mitchell as the real mother, but the film belongs to child actor Michel Ray who gives the role subtle nuances and comprehension not normally associated with child performers. One of the reasons he landed the role is that he could ski (as we see him do in opening sequences.) Later in life Michel Ray, As Michel de Carvalho, achieved some fame as a medal-winning Olympic skier and was immensely successful in the world of business.