OVP: The Green Years (1946)

Film: The Green Years (1946)

Stars: Charles Coburn, Tom Drake, Beverly Tyler, Hume Cronyn, Gladys Cooper, Dean Stockwell, Jessica Tandy

Director: Victor Saville

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Charles Coburn, Cinematography)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I got asked recently whether it was hard to write reviews of bad movies, and I answered honestly that it wasn't.  Bad movies can be fascinating even if they're bad, because of the ways that they're bad.  A bad movie has a perspective, it has something to say & it just totally gets lost in saying it.  The harder reviews (for me) to write are movies that just sort of sit there.  These kinds of movies exist every year, but they do show up in a specific style in the 1940's, when the world had endured a difficult war & people wanted to see pleasant things with limited conflict.  The most famous examples of this type of film are Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, which are not so much movies as a series of motifs that have very little conflict & clear answers to every problem that comes along.  I don't enjoy these types of movies because while I get why they exist, they are not compelling in retrospect, and unfortunately for me, The Green Years falls into this category.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is centered around Robert Shannon (Stockwell as a boy, Drake as an adult), an orphan who must live with relatives, and becomes attached to his great-grandfather Alexander Gow (Coburn), an unkempt fellow who serves as an unlikely role model for the straight-laced young lad.  The movie expands upon their relationship, and the complicated day-to-day life of this poor Scottish family as they enter the modern age & World War I, and shows how Robert becomes a doctor against the odds.

Like I said, the film doesn't really have much there-there's no proper conflict to the film.  Hume Cronyn is meant to play the villain, but really all he does is sit there hoarding nonexistent fortunes, and most of the plot is "we're poor, and who will get the money?"  There are major moments of pain (including two out-of-the-blue deaths, one a bit galling as a classmate of Robert's is run over by a train, thus giving Robert a scholarship opening to go to medical school), but they don't register & the film doesn't know how to capitalize on them.  It's not helped by the fact that Drake & Beverly Tyler's romance is a dud, and you don't want to spend any time with the main characters.  I'm going with the rare 1-star not exactly because it was bad, but because it has so little risk, and even that risk doesn't pay off.

The film won two Oscar nominations, for Best Supporting Actor & Cinematography.  Coburn could play this part in his sleep, and while it's fun, there's nothing much to it.  He's playing this role simply as a warm old man who is cantankerous...and yet is generous from the get-go with this orphaned boy.  He's supposed to be cantankerous, but they don't even bother to have him thaw to the boy as the film progresses.  The Cinematography is a nonstarter for me as well-nothing distinguishes the mostly interior scenes, and there's barely any closeup shots that work well.  Overall, it's the type of movie that you won't remember, which makes it an even greater sin than merely being bad.