JohnHowardReid My chief problem with the picture is not that I think Cooper is woefully miscast, as do most of the movie's detractors. It's a most unusual role for Coop certainly, but, in my opinion, he makes quite a fair fist of it. I also liked Ida Lupino, but I felt the normally ultra-reliable Donald Meek made but a poor impression with his role-admittedly small, but important. On the other hand, Douglass Dumbrille is given an elaborate introduction as the colonel, but then completely disappears! As for the children - Dickie Moore and Virginia Weidler - they are both absolute horrors, though Master Moore is far the more obnoxious of the two.Admittedly, I hardly expected du Maurier's Mimsey to be accurately (or even half-heartedly) translated to film. But even so, Miss Weidler is surely the very opposite of the child du Maurier describes: "the reverse of beautiful, although she would have had fine eyes but for her red lashless lids. She wore her thick hair cropped short, like a boy, and was pasty and sallow in complexion, hollow-cheeked, thick-featured, and overgrown, with long thin hands and feet, and arms and legs of quite pathetic length and tennity; a silent and melancholy little girl, who sucked her thumb perpetually, and kept her own counsel." Fortunately, both Ann Harding and John Halliday are cast more in the du Maurier mold, and - what's more important - both display excellent presence and ability.The chief problem for me really comes down to Hathaway. He seemed to me to be a bit out of his element here. Three of the players were so embarrassingly bad, it's almost beyond belief that a skillful director could allow such ineptitude to slip by. Especially with such key support players. Admittedly, two were children, but Hathaway himself was a child actor. You could understand a bit-player or a minor actor gumming up a scene. He's on the set for a few days at most - and then gone forever. But actors that a director is supposed to be guiding, day in, day out, for weeks on end! Hathaway has stated, on more than one occasion, that actors are hired to act. It is not the director's job, he feels, to guide them with their interpretations, let alone help and succor actors who have been miscast or are out of their depth. On the other hand, Hathaway would know from his own personal experiences the particular requirements of child actors and one would expect him to rise to the challenge. But this was obviously not the case here.If Hathaway is not the man for the players, he is also not the man for this type of story. He's an action man, not a Lubitsch who can handle fantasy and Romance. That's "Romance" with a capital "R", not sex, or even just your everyday celluloid boy-meets-girl. The two or three action scenes and the tense confrontation at the dinner-table (masterfully shot from six or eight angles, and skilfully edited by Stuart Heisler) do come across with powerful effectiveness. But elsewhere, Hathaway is obviously laboring with difficulty with unfamiliar surroundings and trappings. The fantasy material lacks tight supervision. Its effects are too obvious, too heavy-handed.I can understand why many French critics love this movie. Sub-titles would not only disguise the inadequacies of Moore's and Weidler's performances, but allow freedom to interpret the visuals more imaginatively and romantically. In a foreign language, - and for those of us with more sensitive dispositions, - "Peter Ibbetson" would likely emerge as a profoundly moving experience.

secondtake Peter Ibbetson (1935)An un-repenting romance, and I mean romance in the sense of two people being in true love for ever and ever no matter what. There is almost nothing less going on here, but who needs anything else? The best of it, in a way, is the fantasia near the end, some remarkable dream and surreal scenes with great effect. Also a great treat is seeing a young Ida Lupino as a sweet and somewhat self-absorbed young woman who is interested in our hero, played by Gary Cooper.But Lupino is secondary, and once things get fully in gear in the present, it is Cooper's romance as Peter Ibbetson with Ann Harding, playing his childhood girlfriend, that makes it click. And no romantic stone is left untouched. By the time the movie gets to its final third you know what is happening, and then it takes a huge turn and things get both crazy and sentimentally moving. A romance turns violent, and then a crime turns first dark and then bright and almost religious (though never actually religious) and a sense of winning against all the odds is the final theme. This may strike some viewers as just wishful thinking and directorial excess, but it's so well done this isn't fair. The special effects are stunning, better than many recent effects, for sure. And what about the filming and acting? All quite first rate. You might pigeonhole this as some kind of Depression-era escapist dream come true kind of film, but it really rises above that. It's about an impossible but not quite impossible ideal of absolute love, something that rises even above having a young Ida Lupino want you in your youth, or above giving up when chained to a wooden plank with a broken back. It's about hoping when it seems there is no hope.But then, that's what people were doing everyday in the mid 1930s, after half a decade of terrible economic times (and without even knowing that another half a decade lay ahead). It's not a great film, but it's a great theme handled well enough to make you perk up. Someone else might have played Cooper's part with more subtlety or sophistication, but Harding is terrific in her role as rich kid turned angel. And Henry Hathaway, directing his heart out for a change, pulls off some great shifts in tone and temperament form one section of the film to the next, and narrowly avoids the sickly sweetness or downright camp that might have trapped another director. He may not have had a really classic film to his name, but among a good dozen very very good ones, from these 1930s dramas to some post-war film noirs, this is one of his best.

wes-connors In the mid-1800s, cute Dickie Moore (as "Gogo") and pretty Virginia Weidler (as "Mimsey") - both around eight years old, according to the script - argue about what to do with a pile of wood. He wants to make a wagon, and she wants to build a dollhouse. The wagon wins. Despite their tender age, the youngsters are "desperately in love." When Master Moore's ailing mother dies, he is taken away from the Parisian suburb, to live in England. He vows to return for his little sweetheart, someday... In the film's first real problem, Moore grows up to become Gary Cooper (re-named Peter Ibbetson). An architect, Mr. Cooper goes back to the old Paris home, where he is contracted to rebuild stables for his childhood friend, now played by Ann Harding (as Mary). When Ms. Harding appears, you immediately know she's the grown-up version of Ms. Weidler, but Cooper doesn't. Understandably, Harding doesn't recognize Cooper as Moore - the two look nothing alike. They are still in love, but... alas, Harding is married... This romantic fantasy began as a Gothic-tinged novel by George du Maurier, grandfather of Daphne (best known in cinema as the author of Alfred Hitchcock's "Rebecca" and "The Birds"). A hit Broadway "Peter Ibbetson" (1917) starred John Barrymore, and led to a silent success for popular Wallace Reid and Elsie Ferguson, re-titled "Forever" (1921). In a more perfect world, George Fitzmaurice might have updated his production for Laurence Olivier and Greta Garbo. Still, much here is excellent. This version's musical score, by Ernst Toch, won an "Academy Award" nomination; and, the combination of work evidenced by director Henry Hathaway and cinematographer Charles Lang is unquestionably award-worthy. The film is extraordinarily beautiful, using the Paramount production team to great effect. Cooper succeeds by building intensity (filling Mr. Reid's shoes, if not Mr. Barrymore's), and Harding is at her personal best. If only love was this eternal… ******* Peter Ibbetson (10/31/35) Henry Hathaway ~ Gary Cooper, Ann Harding, John Halliday, Dickie Moore

nnnn45089191 Peter Ibbetson seemed like a wonderful movie until the movie changed its tone the last part of the story.The turn to melodrama and fantasy wasn't too my liking.Gary cooper and Ann Harding deliver good performances as the leads.There's also a noteworthy early performance by Ida Lupino.The movie is beautiful to look at thanks to the exquisite photography by Charles Lang."Peter Ibbetson" reminded me of a movie with a similar theme made a few years later "Wuthering Heights". I didn't find "Peter Ibbetson" as good as that one.Henry Hathaway who earlier that year made "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer" was better directing action-adventure sagas, but does a competent job here. Not a bad movie, but not among those I will return to often.