Henry Hathaway's "Peter Ibbetson" is one of the strangest love stories ever to have come out of Hollywood. It's a kind of 'Wuthering Heights', only with Heathcliffe and Cathy's roles reversed and Gary Cooper makes for a very strange 'Cathy'. It was based on George Du Maurier's novel and a subsequent play and is about how childhood friends Gogo and Mimsey, (those precociously talented brats Dickie Moore and Virginia Weidler), grow up to be Peter and Mary, (he's Cooper and she's Ann Harding), are separated, reunited, except that she's now married to John Halliday and whose love knows no bounds as in even death can't tear them apart, (yes, it's that kind of nonsense).
On the plus side, however, it's visually superb and it's certainly not like anything else by Hathaway while both Cooper and Harding are both excellent but it's also preposterous in an often gob-smackingly awful way and its reputation in some quarters, (David Thomson, amongst others, is quite a fan), is highly exaggerated. Maybe you have to be in the mood for it and perhaps one day I'll revisit it to see what I missed, if anything, first time round but for now let's call it a curiosity and give Hollywood kudos for making it at all.
On the plus side, however, it's visually superb and it's certainly not like anything else by Hathaway while both Cooper and Harding are both excellent but it's also preposterous in an often gob-smackingly awful way and its reputation in some quarters, (David Thomson, amongst others, is quite a fan), is highly exaggerated. Maybe you have to be in the mood for it and perhaps one day I'll revisit it to see what I missed, if anything, first time round but for now let's call it a curiosity and give Hollywood kudos for making it at all.