Winter Meeting

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Winter Meeting (1948) is a American drama film directed by Bretaigne Windust. The screenplay by Catherine Turney is based on a novel by Ethel Vance. The melodramatic plot of the Warner Bros. release focuses on the relationship between disenchanted prim and proper poetess Susan Grieve and embittered World War II hero Lieutenant Slick Novak.

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[edit] Synopsis

Susan, escorted by her friend Stacy Grant, meets Slick at a Manhattan restaurant where a dinner party is being held in his honor. He is more interested in Susan than his blind date Peggy Markham and offers to take her home at the end of the evening. The two become better acquainted over coffee in Susan's apartment, and she first resists but then succumbs to his charms when he tries to kiss her. The next day he returns to see her, and she spontaneously invites him to spend the remainder of his leave with her at her country house. In this setting, the two share secrets about each other, Susan telling him about her clergyman father's descent into insanity and eventual suicide, and how it estranged her from her mother, he confessing his longtime desire to become a priest and revealing the guilt he feels about surviving the war while others died in battle. Slick returns to the city alone, and Susan later accidentally runs into him and Peggy in the restaurant where they first met. The following day, he visits Susan's apartment and suggests they try to make their relationship work, but she urges him to reconsider the priesthood and the two part. Susan, having learned her mother has been hospitalized, then calls her in the hope the two can reunite.

[edit] Production notes

The film cost $1,927,000 but earned only $1,083,000 at the box office [1]. It was Davis' first film to lose money [2] and commercially her least successful Warners release.

[edit] Principal cast

[edit] Principal production credits

[edit] Critical reception

In his review in the New York Times, Bosley Crowther opined, "Of all the frustrating experiences that Bette Davis has had in films . . . [this] is clearly the most bewildering, not only for her but for us . . . No doubt, the people at Warners thought they were doing Miss Davis a good turn by putting her in this situation which would tax the composure of a lady Job . . . But actually [their] generosity is Miss Davis' misfortune in this case and her manner of handling the situation is much better than that of the script . . . she actually catches at times some sense of a woman's deep disturbance at a most puzzling turn in an affair of love. And never, let's say to her credit, does she nibble the scenery as of yore. However, the explanation may be that she's so busy speaking lines — endless lines of completely tedious dialogue — that she has no time for anything else . . . Catherine Turney, who assembled this rhetoric . . . should be made to sit through Winter Meeting about twenty-five or thirty times — which is the number of times you are likely to feel you've sat through it when you've seen it once." [3]

According to TV Guide, "This one has more talk than a Senate filibuster and is only a tenth as interesting. Bette Davis is one of the great 'sufferers' of the silver screen and she does it again here, but the audience suffers just as much in this overblown drama." [4]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television by H. Mark Glancy, March 1995
  2. ^ All About All About Eve by Sam Staggs, St. Martin's Press, 2001, pg. 70, ISBN 0312273150
  3. ^ New York Times review
  4. ^ TV Guide review

[edit] External links

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American films of the 1940s
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