Word: veils
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Between the Lines. In Oakland, in its classified advertising columns, the Tribune offered: "Hollywood bed frame, mattress, springs; wedding veil, reasonable...
...Blue Veil, a much slicker job with an imposing cast, tells the sad, sad story of a determinedly selfless woman (Jane Wyman) who goes through life (in four episodes) mothering other people's children and hiding her sorrows behind the traditional blue veil of the old-world governess. The picture is well calculated to please the kind of audiences who confuse a good cry with a good movie...
Thanks largely to a fine performance by Charles Laughton as a bumbling, middle-aged widower trying to woo his baby's pretty governess, The Blue Veil's first episode could hold its own as part of an omnibus film like Quartet. Governess Wyman, a widow who has lost her own baby, gently parries Widower Laughton's attentions and loses him willingly to his designing secretary (Vivian Vance), who thereupon cuts her adrift from the household and from the little toddler she has grown to love...
From that point on, The Blue Veil, though acted and directed with praiseworthy restraint, grows increasingly maudlin. Succeeding episodes merely repeat Governess Wyman's plight in triplicate, each time heaping her with keener deprivations and sanctifying her with brighter nobility. Marriage beckons Jane a second time, and with it a good man's love, but she remains always a substitute mother, never a bride...
...bourgeois type who thinks his daughter can do a lot better. Torn with love and bitterness, Channon studies mystic books, tampers with the supernatural, and is struck dead. But he returns as a dybbuk, to inhabit the body of Leah herself, just as she is presented with her wedding veil. In the final act, a rabbi exorcises the dybbuk, but Leah collapses, to join her beloved Channon in death...