OVP: Lydia (1941)

Film: Lydia (1941)

Stars: Merle Oberon, Joseph Cotten, Hans Jaray, Alan Marshal, Edna May Oliver, George Reeves

Director: Julien Duvivier

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

One of the more daunting aspects of the Oscar Viewing Project comes from the films of the late 1930's & early 1940's.  This is one of my favorite Hollywood eras.  It is also exhausting when it comes to just how many films were nominated for Academy Awards during this time frame, principally because the music categories had so many pictures that were cited.  The song & score categories could have as many as twenty nominees at the time due to quirks in the Academy bylaws, and this results in at least 100 of the remaining films I have left for the project solely coming from being nominated for a music award in this ten year stretch.  One of those films (up until this past weekend) was Lydia, a largely forgotten Merle Oberon melodrama, cited for its score.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is told largely in flashback, after Michael (Cotten) and Lydia (Oberon) meet.  They were once young lovers who could never get the timing right, and Michael has spent his whole life loving her while she has embraced her "spinsterhood" by improving the lives of the less fortunate.  Michael assembles a team of her other former beaus, and they all reminisce about her youth, how she came to romance them all (and then how they left her), and then telling the secret of her romance with Richard (Marshal), where she essentially lived-in-sin with him (there's strong indications they had sex as they lived together in a seaside home despite not being married).  The film ends tragically, with the three men doting upon Lydia but her still in love with Richard, and then when Richard comes, she's ready to forgive him but he doesn't remember her-their love only meant something to Lydia.  She realizes that her life has always been a story of different "Lydia's" and she never truly was herself.

The film is a bit of a bore, honestly.  While I generally like Joseph Cotten, Merle Oberon is a star that has virtually no appeal to me, even in movies I've liked of hers (specifically Wuthering Heights).  Her accent work is dreadful (is she British?  From Connecticut?  Just exceedingly rich?) and the backstory on all of the men is confusing.  Oberon's feelings for all of these men, particularly Cotten, is bizarre-she plays her character as alternating between Katharine Hepburn style independence or Celia Johnson-esque forlornness.  Neither of these things work, and while the ending is brutal (when we find out the one true love of Lydia' life never loved her the way the other three men did), and would've been a killer ending to a better movie, Lydia suffers from a lack of investment in these characters.

The film's sole Oscar nomination is unearned as well.  Miklos Rozsa was one of the finest composers of the era, a classically-trained conductor who, despite over 100 film scores, saw this as simply a "second career" to his traditional classical conducting.  His music here is lovely, but it's overbearing & doesn't fit the movie-it's too grand for such a trifle, and oftentimes feels like it's undercutting a script & acting that is not able to keep up with the film's designs.  As a result, it likely sounds terrific outside of the movie, but within the context it's a poor fit, and an unworthy citation no matter how many nominations studios were afforded in the music categories in the 1940's.