DECEMBER’S SCREENING AT OLD CITY HALL
It’s holiday time and we have the perfect film to celebrate – a wartime romantic drama starring Ginger Rogers, Joseph Cotton and a grown-up Shirley Temple in I’LL BE SEEING YOU. Produced in 1944 and released in January 1945, it deals with the problem of post-traumatic stress disorder, a subject almost never dealt with in films during the war.
Joseph Cotton plays a soldier on leave from an army psychiatric hospital who meets Ginger on a train. On her way to spend the holidays with her aunt and uncle, she invites Cotton to visit her… but refrains from telling him that she too is on furlough… from prison! What ensues is a suspenseful, but warm-hearted, mid-western, family tale and tender love story set over the Christmas and New Year holidays.
Ginger told me personally that she felt Mary, the part she played in this film, was the closest to her real character as any she played in her long career. I would agree… and would add that the film is a fairly true depiction of how Americans lived 70 years ago. It’s an interesting window into our past.
I’LL BE SEEING YOU screens at 7 P.M. in Old City Hall on December 14th.