Random Harvest |  | Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Actors: Ronald Colman, Greer Garson, Philip Dorn, Susan Peters, Henry Travers
Studio: Warner Home Video
Category: DVD
List Price: $19.98
Buy New: $9.16
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Rating:  85 reviews
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Dubbed
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), French (Dubbed)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 126 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.3 x 0.6
MPN: 65251
ISBN: 0790747774
UPC: 012569525122
EAN: 9780790747774
Theatrical Release Date: February 28, 1942
Release Date: January 11, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | Paula Smith (Greer Garson) is the secretary of industrialist Charles Rainier (Ronald Colman). She's also his wife, which Charles does not know. Shell-shocked during World War I, he doesn't recall his days as her husband, John Smith. Advised not to endanger Charles' fragile mental state, Paula cannot openly reveal her identity. She must find other ways to help him remember their life together.From |
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Product Description
Paula Smith (Greer Garson) is the secretary of industrialist Charles Rainier (Ronald Colman). She's also his wife which Charles does not know. Shell-shocked during World War I he doesn't recall his days as her husband John Smith. Advised not to endanger Charles' fragile mental state Paula cannot openly reveal her identity. She must find other ways to help him remember their life together. From the novel by James Hilton (Goodbye Mr. Chips Lost Horizon) comes one of the great sentimental romance movies. Garson's Paula alongside her same-year triumph as Mrs. Miniver established her persona as the strong self-sacrificing wife. Random Harvest gathered seven Academy AwardO nominations* (including Best Picture and Colman as Best Actor) and also reaped a box-office harvest as the year's #4 hit.Running Time: 126 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 012569525122
Amazon.com
The ultimate tearjerker, this 1942 romance classic directed by Mervyn LeRoy (based on a novel by James Hilton) stars Ronald Colman as a British army officer suffering from amnesia after World War I. After falling in love with and marrying a dance-hall singer (Greer Garson), Colman's happy character begins a career as a writer and doesn't seem to mind that he doesn't remember who he is. A car accident changes all that, however, causing the hero's memory to return and making him forget all about his lovely cottage and bride. LeRoy modulates the obvious suspense element in the story (for example, is Colman going to remember Greer or not?) extremely well, building ever-so-deliciously slowly toward a huge payoff. This is one of the great date movies of all time. --Tom Keogh
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 85
 What movies are meant to be! November 13, 2009
Judi Paparozzi (Kure Beach NC United States)
Random Harvest is truly one of the most romantic, well written and acted movies of all time. This movie captures the essence of why we go to the movies. Ronald Colman, an amnesiac from the Great War, is found by Greer Garson, in her most engaging of all films, wandering the streets, and she cares for him. She helps him heal with love despite the best psychiatric care available to wounded soldiers, and they fall in love and marry and then she becomes pregnant. His pre-War brilliance begins to emerge, and he is hired to write for a newspaper in Liverpool; while securing the job, he is struck by a car and his memory returns...and he forgets his life with her. In one of the most clever plots ever, they are reunited, but he is still unable to remember her. It's heart wrenching, but the finale still makes me cry. I met Greer Garson in 1976 at my college where she and her husband were benefactors (College of Santa Fe in NM), and she aired this movie to the college for the students to enjoy! (I sat right in front of her crying my eyes out!) She loved it too! She was wonderfully generous to the College of Santa Fe and its students. Despite her fame and great beauty even late in life, she was so kind to everyone. She shared a story about Random Harvest; she told me that she would call Ronnie when RH was played on late night TV in the New York area to reminisce about how wonderful RH still was many years later! I believe she said this was her favorite film, and it is one of mine. I even named one of my dogs, Smithy!
The greatest tearjerker of it's era? Could be. September 13, 2009
Muzzlehatch (the walls of Gormenghast)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Not many novelists have had a better and more fruitful relationship with Hollywood than James Hilton, author of the 1941 novel on which this film, starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson, is based. Hilton's 1933 bestseller "Lost Horizon" was turned into one of the great romantic fantasy-adventures (nominated for 7 Oscars) of all time by Frank Capra in 1937; his 1934 "Goodbye Mr. Chips" was filmed in that well-regarded year of 1939 by Sam Wood, also received 7 Oscar nominations including a win for Robert Donat as Best Actor; Hilton won an Oscar himself for his screenplay of "Mrs. Miniver" three years later, which also won the Leading Actress award for Greer Garson, and Best Picture. Everything he touched for a decade or so seemed to turn to gold - or at least silver.
"Random Harvest" isn't quite as well remembered as the other films I mentioned, though it also received a lucky 7 Oscar bids, winning none in that year of "Miniver"'s dominance. It's the story of a shell-shocked World War I veteran (Ronald Colman - at 51 just a might too old to be convincing as a young soldier in the early parts of the film) who escapes from a mental hospital during the confusion and celebration of Armistice Day and falls in with a young dancehall performer, Paula (Garson), who christens the memory-impaired and stuttering man "Smithy". An accident in which Smithy knocks down a man as he's being searched for leads the two to leave the town of Melford and travel west to a small village in the hopes of Smithy getting well and retrieving his memory. He doesn't, but he and Paula soon fall in love, marry, and have a child, and he begins a career as a writer. On his way to meet a publisher in Liverpool, he gets hit by a car, falls down, and remembers who he was - but loses his recent past, and Paula. How Smithy, now wealthy scion of industry Charles Rainier, and Paula find each other again you should find out for yourself.
Simply put, "Random Harvest" is my favorite tearjerker of it's era. LeRoy's direction and the camerawork are simple, smooth and never ostentation - sure it's got the typically lovely MGM "house style" but this is a film entirely focused on character, feeling, memory, loss. If you've never seen it before, or never read the book, there's quite an amazing couple of "shock" scenes which are hard for me to judge properly now having seen the film 8 or 10 times but which do seem absolutely right in this kind of melodrama - nothing is really overdone here despite a certain silliness in the concept as the film runs towards it's glorious ending. The film removes a good chunk of the political content that the book is full of - which is probably all for the best when it comes to current audiences, it feels much more relevant as a purely romantic story about two individuals struggling to find the real truths in each other. The whole structure of the film is different as well - the novel is told in flashbacks, which would in the film be hard to do without the central revelation coming too soon; and the role of Kitty, Charles Rainier's young niece who falls for him and is about to marry him, is lessened somewhat in the film (though her central importance as a reminder to Charles that "something" is missing in his new life, something from those years he has lost, remains) while a whole subplot involving Smithy and Paula living with a clergyman in London is removed entirely. As I said - the concentration is entirely on the love story and as such it achieves a resonance and intensity that is awfully rare.
Much of this intensity is of course attributable to the lead performances of Colman, measured and never getting to the Barrymore-esque hamminess that he could be prone to, and especially Garson who I think gives the performance of her career here. Her Paula is the essence of the good, self-sacrificing person taken to a fairly ridiculous extreme - but Garson pulls it off with intelligence and real energy, she's a powerful force of life throughout and doesn't waver when "Smithy" eventually comes into his own as her equal - and she makes you believe that she could, in fact, wait a good chunk of a lifetime and singlemindedly work towards a dream that in the end seems almost mystical as it turns fantasy to awakening...
Random Harvest September 11, 2009
grape girl
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I've have always enjoyed this movie. It was time to have a copy for my library. Greer Garson is so lovely and charming. Ronald Coleman is a WWI soldier who has lost his memory. Greer Garson is a show show who helps him out. This is a love story about these two individuals who become separated and how they are brought back.
Fred Staire & Rita Hayworth-You Never Looked Loviler August 11, 2009
Marlene R. Westerberg (Florence, Oregon USA)
I really enjoyed this video very much, Rita & Fred were so beautiful to watch an enjoy if more people could see it an their feeling would be the same. Another movie is this Random Harvest with Ronald Coleman an Greer Garson, that was truely a wonderful movie set in World War 1.
Always a Harvest!!!!!!!!! July 19, 2009
Robert Shure (Santa Fe, NM)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am 77 years old..To see Garson and Colman, two of the greatest actors in Hollywood history, again, in , what probably is one of their greatest roles............the electricity between them, the magnificent portrayal..though a REAL tear jerker.... one doesn't care, in the presence of such great acting.............Still one of my favorite movies..
Showing reviews 1-5 of 85
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