Green Dolphin Street (1947)

 

Green Dolphin Street is quite the potboiler. It’s an epic soap opera about two sisters who fall in love with the same man, about how a woman’s ambitions during the 1840s had to be subsumed into her husband’s, even about the dangers of colonialism. It’s also, for a thrilling six minutes, a spectacular disaster movie. Lana Turner and Donna Reed are the Patourel sisters, and they both fall in love with newly arrived neighbor William Ozanne (played by Richard Hart). Oddly enough, their mother, played by the superb Gladys Cooper, had a relationship decades earlier with William’s father, Dr. Edmond Ozonne (Frank Morgan, best remembered as the Wizard from The Wizard of Oz but demonstrating some real emotional depth here). Reed plays Marguerite, the so-called “nice” sister, and Turner plays Marianne, the sister who’s always scheming and looking for a way to make money. She has a good mind for business, but being a woman during that time means that she isn’t taken seriously. The film has a rather leisurely pace at almost 2.5 hours, but a lot happens to the characters over the span of the several years covered by the plot. For example, William joins the Navy thanks to Marianne’s influence, but he’s charged with desertion after being drugged and robbed in China. That leads him to escape to New Zealand to avoid prosecution. He meets Van Heflin’s Timothy Haslam, who had a secret crush on Marianne back in her hometown of San Pierre off the English coast. (The oddest coincidences occur in this film.) William gets drunk, writes a letter to Marguerite’s father, accidently asks to marry the wrong sister, setting of a chain of events that leads to Marianne coming all the way to New Zealand to marry him. The move challenges Turner’s Marianne, but she acclimates enough to start advising William and Timothy how to run their lumber business better. Turner and Hart may be meant as the primary focus of the film, but several members of the cast have memorable moments. Cooper delivers an amazing deathbed scene, where her character confesses to her husband (played by Edmund Gwenn, still best remembered as Kris Kringle from Miracle on 34^th Street) that she grew to love him more than she ever loved Edmond. There’s a nice parallel scene later in the film when Hart’s William explains how his feelings have evolved for Marianne. Marguerite, the “jilted” sister, is really a supporting role, but Reed does get a very physical scene involving her climbing up the center of a mountain to avoid the rising tides. The film won an Oscar for its special effects, and it’s easy to see why. The earthquake and flood sequence is a true highlight. As an aside, Turner’s character is meant to be pregnant at the time of the earthquake, but of course, she doesn’t look pregnant at all, certainly not in the period costume in which she’s clothed. Films weren’t allowed to show pregnancy onscreen during the era of the Production Code, which is quite ludicrous when you’re told that the woman on screen has given birth. That’s a minor objection, though. Otherwise, since Green Dolphin Street is an MGM film, many elements, such as the production design and costume design, are first rate. You have to admire a film that has an abbey at the top of a mountain so that the sisters are frequently divided from the rest of San Pierre by rising tides. (I guess that’s one way to keep the nuns mostly isolated from the rest of society.) Turner was really more of a movie star than a great actress at this point in her career, and she easily is the most interesting performer in this picture. She’s paired with a rather wan leading man, frankly, so by comparison, she’s given many moments to shine. I think some of her most effective work occurs when she and her family are captured during a Maori rebellion—I told you that a lot happens in this movie. However, as good as Turner is, the script fails her when it requires her to pretend that she didn’t know that William was more in love with her sister than herself. That rings particularly false for an attentive viewer and almost undermines what has transpired in the first two hours of the film.

Oscar Win: Best Special Effects

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Black-and-White Cinematography, Best Sound Recording, and Best Film Editing