A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I am only giving a 5 due to the performance of Irene. But yet again through the years the projection of America as all there is to this world is ridiculous. As if any Scot or Englishman would actually accept the words mentioned in the film. Disgusting. On the other hand its more of a romance novel than a war movie as war is like a sidewalk into this film. The story line overall is nice but it should be filmed in a difference scene than use the theme of war to input this romance story. presenting the power of actors and words in the art of cinema is one thing, but using it as political brainwashing a propaganda is another. As a scene from the film America is a circus just like the band marches when war is announced by them.

An American woman's two-week trip to England becomes a lifetime stay as she marries a British baron. This drama follows the woman through thirty years in England, spanning two world wars. It touches upon the U.S.-U.K. dynamic and has a bit of romance in it, but ultimately it becomes about war.The voice-over poetry came across as cheesy to me and the film ends with a dash of WWII propaganda. A lot of the film is about how Americans and Englishmen don't always see eye-to-eye, but England depends on the aid of its American brethren to defeat the evils of the world (not once, but twice).Irene Dunne plays the woman, with Frank Morgan as her father and Alan Marshal as her beau. Dunne is fine in this purely dramatic role. I also thought it was odd that she was playing a character named Dunn. Be sure to watch out for a 15-year-old Roddy McDowell and a 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor toward the end.While the film seemed decent enough, if unspectacular, I think the poetry took a little away from it. And it seemed a bit too much like a "chick movie" for my personal tastes.6.5/10

Irene Dunne is all in all herself, tender, transformative and powerful as an American girl who travels to England and falls in love with an English member of the aristocracy. Beautiful Irene marries the Englishman but their honeymoon is cut short on its first day as World War I breaks out. Director Clarence Brown's leisurely mood effect causes us to feel as disrupted as they do. Perhaps it is the soothing joy derived from the old-style black-and-white 35mm Spherical look, a classicism in George J. Folsey's cozy cinematography, that creates such a peaceful atmosphere. Believe me: This feeling is augmented by seeing it on a VHS tape, almost as though you are watching a timeworn relic. When the film quietly, serenely begins, Irene reflects upon her feelings relating to her life in England, a life she never expected to lead from event to event beginning with her purely dabbling arrival. The moving musical score fits like a velvet glove over the sustained close shot of her gorgeous face and the iceberg-thawing sound of her voice.The backbiting between Irene and her English counterparts early in the film is funny, posing one of the movie's unanxious emotional successes which as well include strong romantic and maternal joys and longings, WWI, brief bursts of rage, mourning, WWII, and the like. A scene in the movie circa the early 1930s sends a chill down the spine, illustrating two polite adolescent German boys, part of an exchange program, staying at the English family's countryside manor. Intimating they were part of early Nazi invasion plans, the boys let it slip in a conversation's startling turn for the less comfortable that they are pondering how the estate's large green would be perfect on which for troop gliders to land.

Keep the home fires burning. Emotional and reflective. We need to look back every fifty years or so to look for values. There are a lot of contemporary connections. Look for Roddy McDowell and Elizabeth Taylor. A good picture of the UK in the first half of the last century, even if only through the the eyes of the early forties. Although in large part a sentimental movie, somewhat in the mode of a soap opera, it deals with the larger issues of life on the home-front. It speaks to the twenty-first century where those of us with money have few participating in the military either personally or financially. Irene Dunne carries the action and supports the sentimentality without undue exaggeration. Some really spectacular patriotic sentiment. Look for the bit about the chess set. Compare Susan Dunn's (Irene Dunne's)father-in-law with the Major in Keeping Up Appearances. Frank Morgan offers a nice contrast to the English scene; one would like to visit Toliver, Rhode Island, which would have existed if it could.