Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 21-March-10
Spoiler Rating: High

I'll Never Forget You (1951)

(aka The House in the Square)

I'll Never Forget You recounts the extraordinary journey of Peter Standish, a nuclear physicist played by Tyrone Power whom lightning blasts from the 20th century into 1784. The trip resembles a twisted foreign-exchange program. Prepped by historical artifacts, Standish anticipates going back in time to swap lives with another man, but his ancestral doppelgänger is yanked out of George III's London and dumped into a future where nothing makes sense. Unfortunately (because this sounds like an interesting part of the tale), the movie does not deal with the forward-traveler but exclusively follows the physicist, who also undergoes a rude awakening. His expectation of shedding modern angst in an era of graceful simplicity fails to match his experience. First, being a careless chrono-tourist, he repeatedly refers to events that have not happened yet so that his 18th-century hosts find him unsettling or demonic. Second, appalled by the barbarism and filth of his surroundings (he witnesses child labor and is mocked for bathing daily), he starts working on unheard-of technologies which further his reputation as devil-spawn. Last, instead of swooning over the woman presumed to become his (or his doppelgänger's) fiancée, he falls in love with her sister (Ann Blyth), who surprises him because she was not mentioned in any of the documents he studied for his trip.

Although the film introduces several intriguing elements of time-travel fantasy, it glosses them over for an underdeveloped effect. A recurrent theme of madness casts suspicion over the whole affair (is it a hallucination?); Standish starts out so overworked and obsessive that a colleague (Michael Rennie) tries to stage a one-man intervention. The public charge of insanity that caps Standish's visit to the past is brushed aside far too lightly (and earlier in the film, which is confusing). His misguided search for a bygone Eden might have been more coherent if it weren't truncated by a flaccid romance. In contrast to Portrait of Jennie, another picture in this month's Spotlight series, I'll Never Forget You treats love not as the powerful catalyst for time travel but as the titillating setup for jealous rivalry and photogenic kissing. Standish's paramour feels utterly fake, a woman without personality who exists solely to soften his disillusionment. She states melodramatically that their love is "more rea… because it's a miracle," but it is difficult to tell what it brings them besides a silly ending. Resorting to one of my least favorite tricks which I call "the human consolation prize," the movie concludes with Standish back in his own day encountering a reincarnation of his lost love. (The human consolation prize is either an exact look-alike or a baby conceived just before one lover's untimely death.)

I'll Never Forget You does employ one nice time-travel device which is not often used. Standish's grand old house is the pivotal point of transport between centuries and the reason he plans his journey in the first place. Old buildings give everyone the opportunity for time travel in a psychic sense, and if it could happen in a literal sense, no doubt the historical echoes in bricks and mortar would help to smooth the ride.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.