User Reviews

What's up with Laurence Olivier's character? The film begins and he's in love with his new wife (Ann Harding) and he is very charming. However, just a few minutes later, he's moody, unpredictable and a jerk! While the idea of his not appreciating his wife and his job getting him down is good, he just comes off as too selfish and emotionally volatile and you can't understand how ANY woman could love such an oaf. I don't think it's really his fault, mind you, but the script that allowed for no slow and logical progression of his moodiness. When they divorce, it is because Oliver "wants a place of my own where I can work"--without a wife or child getting in his way! Nice guy, huh? In hindsight, I think the film might have been better if they'd had Olivier be nicer--at least until his career has truly hit bottom.

Now time has passed. Harding has remarried--this time to a genuinely nice guy. However, six years later, she meets up with Olivier while in Switzerland and he tries very hard to win her back despite the past. Considering that his child now is happy and only knows the other man as her father and the ex-wife seems happy, you can correctly assume that Olivier's character STILL is a very selfish and despicable man. How Harding or anyone could fall for him or even talk with him again defies common sense and made the movie tough going for me. Harding allowing Olivier the chance to win her back by letting him wine and dine her on the boat voyage back to the States made her a bit despicable in my eyes as well.

I think the movie COULD have worked had Harding NOT created a new life with a new husband. After all, the new husband didn't deserve to be hurt. Secondly, they should have shown Olivier undergo a genuine transformation into a truly decent guy--not the same old guy who has mellowed some because he's now a successful writer.

Overall, the film looks good and has good production values. However, I have a hard time thinking about any film of the time with such convoluted characters and values. After all, Harding DID seem quite wiling to hurt her new husband and going back to Olivier only possibly fell through at the very last minute. In fact, such a film could not have been made after the Production Code was strengthened in 1934, as the behaviors of the characters in the film would have violated the new standards of the film industry. Call me old fashioned, but in this particular case, I longed for the post-code values.

Laurence Olivier plays a self-centered jerk. Ann Harding plays an immoral fool. And neither one seems to care much what happens to their poor daughter Bonita Granville.

After their marriage, Ann seems to be a self-respecting woman providing a good home, but who isn't going to let her husband bully her. He chooses to leave her because he can't stand her or their child. She remarries and appears happy with her life until old Laurence shows up again trying to rekindle a flame. She makes half-hearted attempts to rebuff him, but clearly she isn't serious about it.

It made me ill watching his egotistical aggressiveness, but I kept hanging in there, looking forward to when she would go back to her devoted husband. Unfortunately, at the end it appears she decides to leave her husband and tear her daughter away from the only father she has ever known. Incredibly disappointing.

I did enjoy Westward Passage on the whole, but the film has quite a few flaws: 1) Olivier's Nick Allen character was unlikeable for the most part, capable of very wide mood swings within a matter of seconds. (Having dated someone like this for 2 ½ years, I can tell you, it's no picnic). It was hard to have any sympathy for him, or to identify with the character. 2) Ann Harding's performance was serviceable, but way too low-key for Olivier, getting lost in their many scenes together, making virtually no impact. 3) By the time ZaSu Pitts returns in the middle of the film, her whining has become so annoying and unecessary, you will feel like punching her lights out. 4) Harding's other love interest is seen as a schemer from the start, and it was difficult to want the two of them to stay together, so he was not really a good foil for Olivier.

Bonita Granville, who played the protagonists‘ daughter, was very good in her small role, and one of the most beautiful children I have ever, ever seen. WOW!

AN EXCELLENT MOMENT: (spoiler) After being slapped in the face by Harding, Olivier, definitely a cad, but no woman-basher, takes his anger and frustration out on Ralph the giraffe (a symbol of his wife) by slapping it across the face. This is such a small thing, yet this little touch, so matter-of-factly played, added both humor and poignancy at a pivotal point in the film. Without a doubt, this was one of the best little pieces of action I have ever seen in a movie, and the filmmakers should be proud.

The film's ending is left open to interpretation as to whether or not there will be a reconciliation between the two, which I thought was good. Lots of nice piano playing of lovely songs throughout the film was also a plus, however the film was too episodic in structure, and therefore never really took off.

Recommended for its good points and for Olivier's performance.

Laurence Olivier, young and slender and dashing, plays an utter jerk in this pre-Code romance, and plays the jerk all too well. A struggling writer, we'd call him manic-depressive today, and his mood swings.doom his marriage to.svelte Ann Harding, stuck playing another of the doting-wife parts she loathed. They divorce after another of many screaming matches, and she marries nice Irving Pichel, who's rich, worshipful of her, and more tolerant of his wife's many encounters with her now-successful ex-husband than he ought to be. This is the sort of movie where a) the characters keep meeting and re-meeting under the unlikeliest of circumstances, b) they age some 10 years, but their looks, the fashions, the cars, etc., never change, and c) we're supposed to root for Harding and Olivier to reunite, which is in fact what happens, though clearly she'd be happier with Pichel, who will be miserable if she leaves him, and the reunited couple are just going to keep on fighting. Plus, she indulges in some decidedly suspect canoodling with Olivier while still married to Pichel. It's indifferently directed, buoyed somewhat by a typical early ZaSu Pitts supporting role, and over before you know it. Well, thank heaven for that.