Absolutely Fantastic

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

My chief problem with the picture is not that I think Cooper is woefully miscast, as do most of the movie's detractors. It's a most unusual role for Coop certainly, but, in my opinion, he makes quite a fair fist of it. I also liked Ida Lupino, but I felt the normally ultra-reliable Donald Meek made but a poor impression with his role-admittedly small, but important. On the other hand, Douglass Dumbrille is given an elaborate introduction as the colonel, but then completely disappears! As for the children - Dickie Moore and Virginia Weidler - they are both absolute horrors, though Master Moore is far the more obnoxious of the two.Admittedly, I hardly expected du Maurier's Mimsey to be accurately (or even half-heartedly) translated to film. But even so, Miss Weidler is surely the very opposite of the child du Maurier describes: "the reverse of beautiful, although she would have had fine eyes but for her red lashless lids. She wore her thick hair cropped short, like a boy, and was pasty and sallow in complexion, hollow-cheeked, thick-featured, and overgrown, with long thin hands and feet, and arms and legs of quite pathetic length and tennity; a silent and melancholy little girl, who sucked her thumb perpetually, and kept her own counsel." Fortunately, both Ann Harding and John Halliday are cast more in the du Maurier mold, and - what's more important - both display excellent presence and ability.The chief problem for me really comes down to Hathaway. He seemed to me to be a bit out of his element here. Three of the players were so embarrassingly bad, it's almost beyond belief that a skillful director could allow such ineptitude to slip by. Especially with such key support players. Admittedly, two were children, but Hathaway himself was a child actor. You could understand a bit-player or a minor actor gumming up a scene. He's on the set for a few days at most - and then gone forever. But actors that a director is supposed to be guiding, day in, day out, for weeks on end! Hathaway has stated, on more than one occasion, that actors are hired to act. It is not the director's job, he feels, to guide them with their interpretations, let alone help and succor actors who have been miscast or are out of their depth. On the other hand, Hathaway would know from his own personal experiences the particular requirements of child actors and one would expect him to rise to the challenge. But this was obviously not the case here.If Hathaway is not the man for the players, he is also not the man for this type of story. He's an action man, not a Lubitsch who can handle fantasy and Romance. That's "Romance" with a capital "R", not sex, or even just your everyday celluloid boy-meets-girl. The two or three action scenes and the tense confrontation at the dinner-table (masterfully shot from six or eight angles, and skilfully edited by Stuart Heisler) do come across with powerful effectiveness. But elsewhere, Hathaway is obviously laboring with difficulty with unfamiliar surroundings and trappings. The fantasy material lacks tight supervision. Its effects are too obvious, too heavy-handed.I can understand why many French critics love this movie. Sub-titles would not only disguise the inadequacies of Moore's and Weidler's performances, but allow freedom to interpret the visuals more imaginatively and romantically. In a foreign language, - and for those of us with more sensitive dispositions, - "Peter Ibbetson" would likely emerge as a profoundly moving experience.

Peter Ibbetson (1935)An un-repenting romance, and I mean romance in the sense of two people being in true love for ever and ever no matter what. There is almost nothing less going on here, but who needs anything else? The best of it, in a way, is the fantasia near the end, some remarkable dream and surreal scenes with great effect. Also a great treat is seeing a young Ida Lupino as a sweet and somewhat self-absorbed young woman who is interested in our hero, played by Gary Cooper.But Lupino is secondary, and once things get fully in gear in the present, it is Cooper's romance as Peter Ibbetson with Ann Harding, playing his childhood girlfriend, that makes it click. And no romantic stone is left untouched. By the time the movie gets to its final third you know what is happening, and then it takes a huge turn and things get both crazy and sentimentally moving. A romance turns violent, and then a crime turns first dark and then bright and almost religious (though never actually religious) and a sense of winning against all the odds is the final theme. This may strike some viewers as just wishful thinking and directorial excess, but it's so well done this isn't fair. The special effects are stunning, better than many recent effects, for sure. And what about the filming and acting? All quite first rate. You might pigeonhole this as some kind of Depression-era escapist dream come true kind of film, but it really rises above that. It's about an impossible but not quite impossible ideal of absolute love, something that rises even above having a young Ida Lupino want you in your youth, or above giving up when chained to a wooden plank with a broken back. It's about hoping when it seems there is no hope.But then, that's what people were doing everyday in the mid 1930s, after half a decade of terrible economic times (and without even knowing that another half a decade lay ahead). It's not a great film, but it's a great theme handled well enough to make you perk up. Someone else might have played Cooper's part with more subtlety or sophistication, but Harding is terrific in her role as rich kid turned angel. And Henry Hathaway, directing his heart out for a change, pulls off some great shifts in tone and temperament form one section of the film to the next, and narrowly avoids the sickly sweetness or downright camp that might have trapped another director. He may not have had a really classic film to his name, but among a good dozen very very good ones, from these 1930s dramas to some post-war film noirs, this is one of his best.

In the abstract,"Peter Ibbetson" is a lovely idea. It's quite another matter in practical terms. It gets off to a good start with the principals as children - in fact, the child actors are better than the adult versions, which is one of my main objections to the film. I am a fan of Gary Cooper despite his limitations as an actor. He's great in action pictures - the strong, silent type with a minimum of expression and dialogue. But he's in over his head as the title character and just lacks the required acting range. There are scenes in which a better actor would register the nuance and facial expression necessary, but Coop registers... not much, I'm afraid. Ann Harding is pretty in a dowdy, fat-faced sort of way but is simply not good enough for the part.Having said that, the picture has a lovely score and the pacing is brisk. Director Hathaway had a long and distinguished career in Hollywood and does his darndest here but is hamstrung by my second objection, the last half of the story, which is, ah, a challenge. I can appreciate fantasy but, ladies and gentlemen, this is over-the-top fantasy and I know when I'm being taken for a ride.I tried, Lord knows, I tried to go with it, but give me a break. I found the first half of the picture hauntingly beautiful ,as a professional movie reviewer might say. And I am as romantic as the next guy. I found the scene in which they re-connected after so many years very touching. I found the scenes between their parting as children even more so. But not the 'dream' scenes as adults - those were far-fetched, and let's leave it at that.There is a question that comes with our reviews on the website that asks, "Did you find this review useful?". This review IS useful, even if you don't agree with it. I just think that there is a fine line between romanticism and goofiness.

I'm glad that Peter Ibbetson has been done as an opera by Deems Taylor because that is the medium that this strange story would most likely be revived. It's a sad and romantic tale that they wrote back in Victorian days, but would hardly make it today.Originally a novel by George DuMaurier, Peter Ibbetson became a play on Broadway that was written by John N. Raphaelson and starred John and Lionel Barrymore on Broadway during the 1917 season. The notion that people in love separated by man could be united and live a life in dreams would have found great popularity in that year with so many lovers and married folks separated by war.Two children played by Dickie Moore and Virginia Weidler grow up to be Gary Cooper and Ann Harding. Moore and Weidler are best friends and neighbors in Paris, a pair of English expatriate families. When Moore's mother dies, his uncle Douglass Dumbrille comes to Paris to take him back to Great Britain to raise and the children are separated.Fast forward many years later and Ann Harding is now the Duchess of Towers and her husband John Halliday the Duke hires a promising young architect to do some major renovations on the estate and its Gary Cooper. At some point Harding and Cooper realize who they are and the memories of a bygone carefree childhood cause them to fall in love. When Halliday finds them in a compromising position, he tries to shoot Cooper who flings a chair at him and kills him.If all things were equal Cooper at most should have been charged with manslaughter. But Halliday being a Duke gains him celebrity status and Cooper apparently without a good attorney gets sentenced to life imprisonment. But as they are separated now, Harding and Cooper connect in their dreams each night and live an incredible life which of course means they never grow old.For today's audience Peter Ibbetson is a bit hard to swallow, but the players are so charming and sincere you actually let your cynicism fall away. The story is remarkably similar to the operetta Maytime and no wonder Deems Taylor saw it as suitable grand opera material. In fact Peter Ibbetson's one Academy Award nomination was for its romantic musical score.As good as Cooper and Harding are, I think in retrospect the film belongs to Dickie Moore and Virginia Weidler. As the children Mimsie and Gogo, the film really belongs to them, you remember their performances throughout the movie as you watch their grownup counterparts.Oddly enough even with a French and later English setting, Peter Ibbetson's cast is mostly American. No one in fact is more American than Gary Cooper, but few also are have as romantic persona and a face the movie camera loved as it did few others. For that reason and others Peter Ibbetson holds up well even in today's far more realistic and cynical age.