After Britain's declaration of war in World War II, army colonel Roy Cronin is driven to London's Waterloo station on his way to France, and briefly alights on Waterloo Bridge to reminisce about events that occurred during World War I when he met Myra Lester, whom he had planned to marry. While Roy gazes at a good-luck charm, a billiken that she had given him, the story unfolds.
Roy, a captain in the Rendleshire Fusiliers on his way to the front, and Myra, a ballerina, serendipitously meet crossing Waterloo Bridge during an air raid, striking up an immediate rapport while taking shelter. Myra invites Roy to attend that evening's ballet performance and an enamored Roy ignores an obligatory dinner with his colonel. Roy sends a note to Myra to join him after the performance, but the note is intercepted by the mistress of the ballet troupe, the tyrannical Madame Olga, who forbids Myra from having any relationship with Roy. Despite the admonition, they meet at a romantic night spot. Roy has to travel to the front immediately and proposes marriage, but wartime circumstances prevent them from marrying immediately. Roy assures Myra that his family will look after her while he is away. Madame Olga learns of Myra's disobedience and dismisses her from the troupe along with fellow dancer Kitty when she scolds Olga for spoiling Myra's happiness.
The young women share a small flat. Unable to find work, they soon become penniless. Roy's mother Lady Margaret Cronin and Myra arrange to meet for an introduction. Awaiting Lady Margaret's belated arrival at a tearoom, Myra scans a newspaper and faints after finding Roy listed among the war dead. Shocked and bewildered, Myra is offered a tall brandy by the receptionist to help bring her around. Sitting alone, Myra swallows a large amount of brandy just as Lady Margaret appears. Unable to disclose the dreadful news, Myra's banal and incoherent conversation is unsettling to her prospective mother-in-law, who withdraws without seeking further explanation. Myra faints again and falls ill with grief. The two young ladies’ economic situation becomes dire. To cover their expenses, her flatmate Kitty becomes a streetwalker. Myra believed that Kitty was working as a stage performer but then learns what her friend has done. Feeling that she has alienated Lady Margaret and having no desire to live, the heartbroken Myra joins her friend Kitty and resorts to prostitution as well. A year passes.
While offering herself to soldiers on leave arriving at Waterloo Station, Myra sees Roy, who is alive and well. He had been wounded and held as a prisoner of war. A reconciliation occurs that is joyous for Roy but bittersweet for Myra. The couple travel to the family estate in Scotland to visit Lady Margaret, who deduces the misunderstanding that occurred at the tearoom. Myra is also accepted by Roy's uncle, the Duke, but he inadvertently feeds her guilt by saying that she could never do anything to bring shame or dishonour to the family. Confronted with the possibility of a scandal and the seeming impossibility of a happy marriage, Myra decides that breaking off the engagement is her only choice. Myra discloses the truth to a compassionate Lady Margaret but is unable to believe herself worthy of marrying Roy. Myra leaves behind a goodbye note and returns to London. Roy follows, with the aid of Kitty, hoping to find her despite discovering the truth in the process. Myra is depressed and returns to Waterloo Bridge, where she commits suicide by walking into the path of an oncoming truck.
In the present day, the older Roy reminisces about Myra's sincere final profession of love that was only for him and no other. He tucks her charm into his coat pocket and gets driven away in his car.
MGM bought the 1931 version of Waterloo Bridge from Universal Studios in order to produce the remake. From its initial release, the 1931 film had been censored in major American cities because of objections to the portrayal of prostitution. The censorship was imposed first by local authorities, such as a Chicago police censorship board, before enforcement by the Hays Office in 1934 made it impossible to exhibit the film anywhere in the United States.
Prostitution is a subject that neither our Ordinance nor Commissioner Alcock permits us to leave in pictures whether for an adult or a general permit. It is a clear violation of all our standards and also, we had understood, a violation of the underlying purpose of the [Motion Picture Production] Code.
Because of the Motion Picture Production Code, which had not been in effect when the 1931 film version was made, plot details of the 1940 version were significantly changed and somewhat sanitized. In the original play and film, based on Sherwood's personal experiences, both characters are Americans; Myra is an unemployed chorus girl who has turned to prostitution and Roy is a callow 19-year-old expatriate who does not realize how she makes money. However, in the 1940 version, both are British, Myra a promising ballerina in a prestigious dance company who becomes a prostitute only after believing that her sweetheart has been killed and Roy a mature officer of Scottish nobility. In the original film, Myra is accidentally killed after her situation with Roy has apparently been happily resolved; in the 1940 version, she commits suicide when her inner conflict becomes insurmountable.[2] The flashback format of the 1940 version was a device added in acknowledgment of the recent onset of war when the script was written in 1939.
Waterloo Bridge capitalized on Leigh's success the previous year in Gone with the Wind. Taylor was eager to show audiences that he was more than the suave and youthful lover whom he had played in such films as Camille and Three Comrades. Leigh wanted Laurence Olivier for the role of Roy Cronin and was unhappy that Taylor had been cast in the part, although she had enjoyed him on the set of A Yank at Oxford.[3] She wrote to her husband Leigh Holman: "Robert Taylor is the man in the picture, and as it was written for Larry, it's a typical piece of miscasting. I am afraid it will be a dreary job ..." Taylor later said of his performance: "It was the first time I really gave a performance that met the often unattainable standards I was always setting for myself." Of Leigh, Taylor said, "Miss Leigh was simply great in her role, and she made me look better." Of all her films, Leigh stated Waterloo Bridge was her favorite.[4] Taylor also named the film as his personal favorite.
Ethel Griffies and Rita Carlisle (then Carlyle), cast respectively in the 1931 film as Myra's landlady and a woman on the bridge when they meet, appear in the 1940 version in similar roles.
Reception
Waterloo Bridge opened in New York and shortly after in London to positive reviews.[5]
In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther was effusive in his praise for Vivien Leigh: "Let there be no doubt about it. Vivien Leigh is as fine an actress as we have on the screen today. Maybe even the finest, and that's a lot to say. Plenty of skeptics are still mumbling that her Scarlett O'Hara was a freak, that any one could have played it with such a wide-open field. We know all about them—and we know, too, about the unreconstructed dissidents. So this is an urgent hint that they ... see this remarkable Miss Leigh in her first picture since 'Gone With the Wind.' If they are not then convinced, we will cover ourself with a sack."[6]
When the film was released in China in November 1940, it was enormously popular. As a result, the story became a standard of Shanghai opera and the song "Auld Lang Syne" became widely known in China.[7][8]
Vivien Leigh, styled as Lady Olivier after 1947, was a British actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, for her performances as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had also played on stage in London's West End in 1949. She also won a Tony Award for her work in the Broadway musical version of Tovarich (1963). Although her career had periods of inactivity, in 1999 the American Film Institute ranked Leigh as the 16th-greatest female movie star of classic Hollywood cinema.
Random Harvest is a 1942 American romantic drama film based on the 1941 James Hilton novel of the same title, directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Claudine West, George Froeschel, and Arthur Wimperis adapted the novel for the screen, and received an Academy Award nomination. The novel keeps the true identity of Paula/Margaret a secret until the very end, something that would have been impossible in a film, where characters’ faces must be seen. This meant that the movie had to take a very different approach to the story. The film stars Ronald Colman as a shellshocked, amnesiac World War I veteran, and Greer Garson as his love interest.
Mervyn LeRoy was an American film director, producer and actor. In his youth he played juvenile roles in vaudeville and silent film comedies.
Katie Scarlett O'Hara is a fictional character and the protagonist in Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind and in the 1939 film of the same name, where she is portrayed by Vivien Leigh. She also is the main character in the 1970 musical Scarlett and the 1991 book Scarlett, a sequel to Gone with the Wind that was written by Alexandra Ripley and adapted for a television mini-series in 1994. During early drafts of the original novel, Mitchell referred to her heroine as "Pansy", and did not decide on the name "Scarlett" until just before the novel went to print. PBS has called O'Hara "quite possibly the most famous female character in American history..."
Robert Taylor was an American film and television actor and singer who was one of the most popular leading men of cinema.
Jill Esmond Moore was an English stage and screen actress.
Caesar and Cleopatra is a 1945 British Technicolor film directed by Gabriel Pascal and starring Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains. Some scenes were directed by Brian Desmond Hurst, who took no formal credit. The picture was adapted from the play Caesar and Cleopatra (1901) by George Bernard Shaw, produced by Independent Producers and Pascal Film Productions and distributed by Eagle-Lion Distributors.
Virginia Field was a British-born film actress.
Mae Clarke was an American actress. She is widely remembered for playing Henry Frankenstein's bride Elizabeth, who is chased by Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, and for being on the receiving end of James Cagney's halved grapefruit in The Public Enemy. Both films were released in 1931.
A Yank at Oxford is a 1938 comedy-drama film directed by Jack Conway and starring Robert Taylor, Lionel Barrymore, Maureen O'Sullivan, Vivien Leigh and Edmund Gwenn. The screenplay was written by John Monk Saunders and Leon Gordon. The film was produced by MGM-British at Denham Studios.
Waterloo Bridge is a 1931 American pre-Code drama romance war film directed by James Whale and starring Mae Clarke and Kent Douglass. The screenplay by Benn Levy and Tom Reed is based on the 1930 play Waterloo Bridge by Robert E. Sherwood.
Waterloo Bridge is a road and foot traffic bridge crossing the River Thames in London.
Gaby is a 1956 American drama film directed by Curtis Bernhardt and starring Leslie Caron, John Kerr, Cedric Hardwicke, Taina Elg and Margalo Gillmore. It is the third version of the 1930 play Waterloo Bridge, previously made into films Waterloo Bridge (1931) and Waterloo Bridge (1940). It is the only version of the play made in color, and the least faithful to it. The title, the names of the main characters, and plot details were all changed. Unlike the 1931 and 1940 versions, this film ends happily.
Anna Karenina is a 1948 British film based on the 1877 novel of the same title by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy.
Robert Douglass Montgomery was an American film actor.
The Deep Blue Sea is a 1955 British drama film directed by Anatole Litvak, starring Vivien Leigh and Kenneth More, and produced by London Films and released by Twentieth Century Fox. The picture was based on the 1952 play of the same name by Terence Rattigan.
Herbert Pope Stothart was an American songwriter, arranger, conductor, and composer. He was nominated for twelve Academy Awards and won Best Original Score for The Wizard of Oz. Stothart was widely acknowledged as a prominent member of the top tier of Hollywood composers during the 1930s and 1940s.
Ethel Griffies was a British actress. She is remembered for portraying the ornithologist Mrs. Bundy in Alfred Hitchcock's classic The Birds (1963). She appeared in stage roles in her native England and in the United States, and had featured roles in around 100 motion pictures. Griffies was one of the oldest working actors in the English-speaking theatre at the time of her death at 97 years old. She acted alongside such stars as May Whitty, Ellen Terry, and Anna Neagle.
Waterloo Bridge: A play in two acts is a 1930 play by Robert E. Sherwood. It premiered on Broadway January 6, 1930 and ran until March 1930. It was the basis for three separate films: Waterloo Bridge (1931), Waterloo Bridge (1940), and Gaby (1956). It is based on the author's experiences during World War I.
Suzanne Farrington was the only child of British actress Vivien Leigh and her first husband, Herbert Leigh Holman. Upon her mother's death, Farrington was bequeathed her mother's papers, including her letters, photographs, contracts and diaries.
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