I'll Be Seeing You (1944)

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Great performances by GINGER ROGERS and Joseph COTTEN make this otherwise slight film worth watching. The film had a great premise but after a point you realize that the makers were only interested in making a feel good movie with a few dark elements. And the supporting cast except for SPRING BRYINGTON is pretty awful. They included a lot of loud and obnoxious characters as a foil for the two melancholic and understated leads.Joseph COTTEN's performance needs special mention. He is such an effortless actor who puts his remarkable screen presence to great use. GINGER ROGERS was a little too beautiful and well dressed to pass off as a woman out on parole.The film does have a christmasy feel to it despite some gripping scenes (like that very violent fight with the dog). Ginger Roger's family was particularly annoying and their presence during the interactions between the two leads curtailed any meaningful plot development.(6/10)

A female convict on furlough for the holidays meets a soldier suffering from post-war trauma. The troubles of the two protagonists could have been handled more deftly, but the film does a very good job of depicting family life on the home front during WWII, helped by some good acting. Rogers is fine as the convict while Cotten is typically solid as the soldier. There are also natural, winning performances from Byington and Tull as Temple's caring parents, who host niece Rogers for the holidays. Future Hollywood Svengali Derek (husband of Ursula Andress, Linda Evans, and Bo Derek) gets his first screen credit in a small role as Temple's date.

This could almost have formed a segment of Since You Went Away which Joseph Cotton and Shirley Temple made that same year. It's also referential in borrowing the basic plot of One-Way Passage (itself remade as Till We Meet Again) substituting a train for an ocean liner but retaining the criminal and health elements; in One-Way Passage William Powell is a convict being escorted back to the States by a cop, Pat O'Brien, who meets on board ship Merle Oberon, who is terminally ill. Both conceal these rather important facts from the other and fall in love. This time around the roles are reversed and it is Ginger Rogers who is serving a prison sentence for manslaughter and has been released in order to spend Christmas with an aunt and Joseph Cotton who is not terminally ill but suffering with serious combat fatigue. Once again Rogers finds herself sharing a bedroom with a teenager and falling for a soldier - four years earlier she bunked with Diana Lynn in and fell for Ray Milland in Billy Wilder's The Major and the Minor. It's a pleasant, sentimental, hokey even, entry a reminder of how wholesome films used to be.

It's funny, but despite having seen and reviewed a bazillion different movies, I'd never heard of this film until I saw it on Netflix recently. Since I really liked Joseph Cotten (a highly underrated actor, if you ask me), I thought I'd give it a try--and I am glad I did, as it's a dandy old film--full of sentiment and romance.The film begins with Cotten meeting Ginger Rogers on a train. She is going to visit her Aunt and Uncle for the Christmas holiday, though he does not know that she's on furlough from prison. He is also on leave--from a military psychiatric hospital where he's recuperating from a serious injury as well as post-traumatic stress disorder. Considering he served on Guadalcanal (one of the longest and most horrible battles of the war), it's perfectly understandable that he is a bit of a mess. What is surprising, though, is that the movie even addresses this. Very, very few films made during or even soon after the war talked about the psychological effects of war. This one dared to talk about the psychiatric cases resulting from such horrors.Partly because she is ashamed and partly because she doesn't want Cotten to be further burdened after she learns of his struggle, Rogers keeps her incarceration a secret to him. It's funny, because when you learn about why she was jailed, it seems that nowadays she'd never have served a day in prison as she accidentally killed a man who was trying to rape her!! I think the problem was that she couldn't prove it and juries were less likely to believe that rapes occurred back then. Regardless, she says nothing and they spend many lovely moments together during both their vacations. He, in particular, likes being able to hang out with her family, as he has none of his own.There's much more to the film than this, but it gets very high marks not only for its willingness to talk about combat fatigue but because it is highly romantic and sweet. It's a great sentimental film that doesn't manage to get gooey or sickly sweet--just nice and a decent film for the holidays. Watch this hidden little gem.