Martin Bradley Another tale of returning veterans but this is no "The Best Years of Our Lives" but a bargain-basement vehicle for up and coming star Guy Madison who may have been the best looking kid on the block but who was never known for his acting talents and sadly he hogs the picture. On the plus side it's neither particularly melodramatic nor sentimental, (it isn't much of anything really though it is a tad on the preachy side). It also has a decent supporting cast that includes a young Robert Mitchum, (very good as the soldier with a plate in his head), Bill Williams as the soldier who has lost his legs and Tom Tully and Ruth Nelson as Madison's parents. His girl is Dorothy McGuire, not bad but underused. The source material was a novel by Niven Busch and the treatment is sudsy at best.

edwagreen Usual western cowboy, Guy Madison, tried something different when he made this 1946 film. Ironically, the best picture of that year, "The Best Years of Our Lives," also dealt with the problems faced by returning soldiers. Obviously, both films were timely.Madison, unfortunately, was miscast in the title lead. The way he called Dorothy McGuire a tramp sounded as if he were 14. Speaking of youth, the story line with the young girl next door infatuated with Madison was ludicrous at best. What were they trying to show, the years he had lost during the war serving his country, or that he was just a teenager at heart?Tom Tully went away from his usual tough guy image and played his understanding father. The always reliable Ruth Nelson, who was so good as Ellen Wilson, Woodrow's first wife, in the great 1944 film "Wilson," plays the endearing mother who showed how upset she was as time passes after Madison comes home from the war.The surprise here is the relative supporting role of Hollywood hunk Bob Mitchum in the film. Mitchum should have played the Madison role.The film has a resounding ending when bigotry is suddenly brought in by an American group referring to themselves as patriots.

aimless-46 Whereas "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) gave a Norman Rockwell picture of returning WWII veterans trying to reintegrate themselves into civilian life, RKO's "Till the End Of Time" (released four months earlier) was more concerned with confronting that subject head-on than idealizing it. Which ultimately makes it a better film if a less popular one with an escape seeking public who already had their fair share of trauma.Years later the television series "China Beach" would feature an episode (Fever) that was a worthy homage to this film. In that episode Nurse McMurphy comes home to Kansas where: " she goes to work as ward nurse at the local hospital while trying to make peace with her increasingly neurotic mother who does not approve of her fast, stressful lifestyle and bitterly tries to cling onto the past". I was reminded of that episode while watching Cliff Harper (Guy Madison) trying to deal with his mother. Particularly a scene where her mother throws McMurphy's fatigue uniforms away and a panicked McMurphy frantically rushes to the curb to retrieve them from the garbage can.The point being that both mothers want the family to resume their lives from the point they were at before the war. And while a part of each veteran wants this same thing, another part of them realizes that it is impossible; so they end up marking time for a period until they can get things sorted out internally. Their readjustment process is one of reconciling the desire to have things as they once were with the desire (need) to hang on to the changes or growth they have undergone. Director Edward Dmytryk symbolically dispels the notion that Cliff can ever pick up his life from where he left off, he does this through an early scene where Cliff discovers that his old civilian clothes are far too small for him. Although played for laughs this scene conveys more than just the physical changes to Cliff during the three years he was been a Marine."Till the End of Time" nicely illustrates this dynamic with the two new women in Cliff's life. Fresh-faced Helen Ingersoll (Jean Porter - Hollywood's all-time cutest actress) is a perfect fit for the pre-war Cliff; the type of girl he would be pursuing if things could magically go back to the way they were. But the high mileage Pat Ruscomb (Dorothy McGuire) is a far better fit for what Cliff has become. Cliff's attraction dynamic with these two females says in a nutshell everything the film is trying to illustrate. Thankfully Williams and McGuire have an effortless chemistry that helps them sell both their mutual attraction and their reluctance to move forward and let go of cherished parts of the past.The plot summary is a bit misleading, saying "three" marines have a hard time readjusting to civilian life and giving Robert Mitchum and Bill Williams (soon to be television's Kit Carson) equal billing with Madison and McGuire; as if there are three equally weighted parallel stories (insert "The Best Years of Our Lives" here). The story centers on Cliff Harper, there are only a few brief scenes that do not feature Madison. So fans of "Surfside Six" will get a full dose of their favorite star.My favorite scene is the one where Porter and Williams "cut a rug" to the sounds of the jukebox in the old soda joint.The most nostalgic scene was shot at the old Iceland skating palace. It looks like Porter does her own skating while someone doubles for McGuire. Unfortunately they did not go on location for the beach scene, and the projected beach background requires considerable suspension of disbelief.Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

wuxmup There was a fair amount of discussion at the end of World War II about the difficulties combat vets might face in readjusting to normal life. "Till the End of Time" puts many of these concerns up on the screen, but the emotion that comes through so memorably in the superior "Best Years of Our Lives" is mostly absent. That's despite the efforts of Dorothy McGuire (who's perfectly cast here as the maybe-27 "older" war widow who's the only civilian who can realistically relate to college-age vet Guy Madison). Except for McGuire, the actors are all rather limited, including Madison and Robert Mitchum. That and a lackluster script make their characters less than compelling, so their very realistic problems look dismayingly like they were inflicted by soap-opera writers rather than by the war.Like many other old movies, the film seemed stronger when it appeared. Since then, we've seen so many unhappy returned veterans in films that the three here are like instant clichés. They weren't in 1946, though, and "Till the End of Time" was one of the first movies to tell Saturday-night civilians that, like Cliff (Madison), you didn't have to be badly shot up (like Mitchum and Williams) to have been profoundly changed by battle. To his suburban parents, Cliff is now a mystery, and his mom doesn't at all approve of his new vocabulary or his friendship with a wounded Marine from "Stinking Creek, Texas." This one is mainly for fans of the stars and for those seriously interested in Hollywood's treatment of World War II