I actually like Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson in most of their films. I don't feel that the failure of this film lies in their acting, but the blame instead lies with whoever wrote the script and the director. Mrs. Parkington is a widow living in a big mansion and her adult children and grandchildren are visiting her on Christmas Eve, and we soon learn they are all leading disappointing unhappy lives. An author visits and leaves Mrs. Parkington a copy of a book he wrote about her "great American" family. This gives opportunity for the series of flashbacks.
So as a girl, Mrs. Parkington (Susie) meets Augustus Parkington in a Nevada mining town where he owns the mine. Pidgeon as Parkington is trying to do Rhett Butler with an English accent. Susie is doing a cross between Cinderella and Scarlett O'Hara, so she goes between having a Southern accent and an English one as the confused westerners look on.
Later on, the mine explodes, killing Susie's mother, and Parkington asks Susie to marry him. Actually, I think all of that vibration is Irving Thalberg turning over in his grave, appalled at what Louis B. Mayer is turning out as product since his death. But I digress. Marry in haste, repent at leisure, and even in his leisure Augustus Parkington is a petty vindictive man who seems like a sexist even by 19th century standards. He's not the usual adorable socially clueless fellow that graceful Garson's character customarily falls in love with. And the clichés just go on from there.
A tip - Do not play a drinking game with this film where you take a shot every time you hear or see a tired movie cliché or you will be dead in twenty minutes. Watch something else. You have better things to do with your life. I give it four points for the art design, because MGM always did get that right, and also for Agnes Moorehead as Augustus Parkington's French aristocrat (????) mistress. He fires her as mistress after the wedding, then employs Moorehead's character as Henry Higgins to Garson's Eliza Doolittle of the Rockies. A novel way out of a sticky situation for Augustus and the only thing in the film that made me smile.
So as a girl, Mrs. Parkington (Susie) meets Augustus Parkington in a Nevada mining town where he owns the mine. Pidgeon as Parkington is trying to do Rhett Butler with an English accent. Susie is doing a cross between Cinderella and Scarlett O'Hara, so she goes between having a Southern accent and an English one as the confused westerners look on.
Later on, the mine explodes, killing Susie's mother, and Parkington asks Susie to marry him. Actually, I think all of that vibration is Irving Thalberg turning over in his grave, appalled at what Louis B. Mayer is turning out as product since his death. But I digress. Marry in haste, repent at leisure, and even in his leisure Augustus Parkington is a petty vindictive man who seems like a sexist even by 19th century standards. He's not the usual adorable socially clueless fellow that graceful Garson's character customarily falls in love with. And the clichés just go on from there.
A tip - Do not play a drinking game with this film where you take a shot every time you hear or see a tired movie cliché or you will be dead in twenty minutes. Watch something else. You have better things to do with your life. I give it four points for the art design, because MGM always did get that right, and also for Agnes Moorehead as Augustus Parkington's French aristocrat (????) mistress. He fires her as mistress after the wedding, then employs Moorehead's character as Henry Higgins to Garson's Eliza Doolittle of the Rockies. A novel way out of a sticky situation for Augustus and the only thing in the film that made me smile.