It may sound like cheap romance, but that is exactly what that movie is about. Only it carries it with such simple force and poetic candor that it makes you forget a certain general stiffness in the acting. Filming has vintage qualities and limitations that can only bring concentration on the story. To me, it has provided one of those rare experiences of strange likenesses with the original material of dreams. Sorry for the improvisation and my stilted English.

This 1933 Gary Cooper film is highly regarded and mentioned in many film books. It was a serious film in tone and content, and also in it's techniques. Initially, it seems a rather bland melodrama about two childhood sweethearts who are parted then reunited. The blandness is somewhat heightened by the visual blandness of Ann Harding, the female star. (She is blonde, but very visually monochromatic… minimal eyebrows or eye make-up, which makes her seem very very plain, even though she is pretty.) This was the "taste of the times" for a serious "good" woman, and the reason I have this listed as an 8 is that it is definitely dated, and will be much too slow for many viewers.

The story is about dreams and architecture, so keep an eye on the buildings, there are really inventive and beautiful buildings. The stable that is supposed to be "horrible" is like a forest cottage in a fairy tale. The child casting at the beginning is funny by today's standards of continuity. These actually are pretty good child actors for the time – not cloying or overly precious - but the boy's coloring is quite dissimilar to the adult. Big brown eyes of the boy becoming the famous baby blues of Cooper. But let these things go, and the early scenes are an effective and emotionally effective set up for the payoff.

The best part of the film comes in the last third. Suddenly, we are in an expressive fantasy – completely grounded in the earlier part, but also completely different. Not only are the effects here still magical, reminiscent of Durer etchings, but they are also really overwhelming when we think about how difficult it was to achieve these effects in this time period. (Any thing that fades in or out - this had to be done by re-filming with the same piece of film, etc.) While never named, it is clearly colored by the "astral body" theories of the Eastern religions that were popular in Hollywood at the time, having a strong influence on art, architecture, and design during this period.

Ultimately this is a beautiful and memorable film about the strength of love, dreams, and the triumph of pure heart. This makes for a very quiet but powerful film. (Quiet and powerful became the hallmark of Cooper's screen character.) The strength of this film is its simplicity of message, and the really memorable and soulful performance of Cooper.

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.