Henry Hathaway's "Peter Ibbetson" is one of the strangest love stories ever to have come out of Hollywood. It's a kind of 'Wuthering Heights' but with the roles of Heathcliff and Cathy reversed and Gary Cooper makes for a very strange 'Cathy'. It was based on George Du Maurier's novel and a subsequent play and is about how childhood friends Gogo and Mimsey, (those precociously talented brats Dickie Moore and Virginia Weidler), grow up to be Peter and Mary, (he's Cooper and she's Ann Harding), are separated, reunited though she's now married to John Halliday, and whose love knows no bounds in that even death itself can't tear them apart, (yes, it's that kind of nonsense).
On the plus side it is visually superb and it's certainly not like anything else by Hathaway while both Cooper and Harding are excellent but it's also preposterous in an often gob-smackingly awful way and its reputation in some quarters, (David Thomson, amongst others, is quite a fan), is highly exaggerated. Maybe you have to be in the right mood for it and perhaps one day I'll revisit it just in case I missed something first time round. For now, however, let's call it a curiosity but give kudos to Hollywood for making it at all.
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